| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 99 === The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the VoIP voice assignments and role play instruction (VVA-RP) on EFL junior high school students’ oral reading fluency. It also attempts to compare the performance and the growth among students of different English proficiency levels on oral reading fluency.
This study is composed of one-semester’s VoIP voice assignments and role play instruction, oral reading fluency (ORF) assessments, and two questionnaire surveys. The subjects are 66 7th graders from two intact classes in a junior high school in Tainan City. One of the classes with 34 students is the experimental group. The other class with 32 students is the control group. The teaching material is their textbook. The materials for role play are from the dialogues and comics in the textbook. The materials for VoIP voice assignments are from the dialogues and readings in the textbook. In order to enhance their learning, cooperative learning is incorporated too. Students are heterogeneously grouped. First, the students do VoIP voice assignments individually at home, and then the teacher plays their recordings in class and discusses their performance. Then they do role play in pairs or in small groups in class. For data collection, the students are administered to do an oral reading fluency pretest and posttest using a one-minute probe. Their readings are recorded using the software Praat, and are to be rated by two junior high school English teachers and one native speaker of English with a Master’s degree in foreign language and literature. The recordings are scored in terms of Raniski’s (2003) MFS (Multidimensional Fluency Scale) and WCPM (words read correctly per minute). As for the data collected from the students’ responses to the questionnaires, they are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The major findings of this study are summarized as follows:
1.Under the proposed instruction, the experimental group made significantly more gains in ORF than did the control group.
2.In an analysis of students’ performance on the four dimensions of MFS, the experimental group outperformed in phrasing, smoothness, and pace, but not in accuracy.
3.The overall ORF gains among the three different EPL groups were not significantly different.
4.The ORF scores assessed either by MFS or WCPM are the same. The experimental group outperformed the control group significantly. In addition, in terms of either way of the assessments, the performances among the three different EPL groups were not significantly different. Therefore WCPM can be seen as an easy and effective way to assess ORF.
5.The findings suggest that the students’ learning attitudes toward English had not improved significantly but nearly so after the proposed instruction (t = -2.49, p=.06 ＞.05). Besides, their attitudes toward role play have significantly improved.
6.The students reported that they had become more concentrative in class and more active in participating in the classroom learning owing to role play.
7.Most students reported that they had paid more attention on pronunciation and intonation on account of VoIP voice assignments, and their pronunciation and intonation had become better accordingly.
To sum up, this study suggests that the VVA-RP instruction is effective to improve junior high school students’ oral reading fluency. Furthermore, the students held positive attitudes towards the proposed instruction. Hence, pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are provided in the end.
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