A Cross-sectional study of the effect of topic familiarity on variability in learner's oral output:the case of license LMD students of english at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia,Jijel University

Abstract

This study operated within a sociolinguistic framework to investigate the extent to which familiarity of the topic being discussed may systematically influence the levels of fluency and accuracy in learners’ oral output. Moreover, this study has attempted to study both synchronically (at each level of the curriculum) and diachronically (as the learners advance across the different levels of the curriculum) the relationship between topic familiarity and learners’ variability in the levels of accuracy and fluency. A test comprising three oral tasks was designed and administered in the order of expected decrease in the levels of accuracy and fluency to a randomly selected cross-sectional sample of 18 students belonging to three different levels (1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year). Each student participant was asked to talk about three different topics, namely: familiar (family life), less familiar (traditional culture), and unfamiliar (post-structuralism). Their performances were audio-recorded then transcribed and analyzed in terms of fluency and accuracy levels in the discussion of each topic. Fluency was measured in terms of pauses and hesitations, repetitions and corrections, length of talk, and subject specific vocabulary. Whereas, Accuracy was operationalized in terms of grammatical errors (syntax, morphology), and pronunciation errors (word pronunciation). It was hypothesized that the learners’ levels of accuracy and fluency will decrease as learners move from the discussion of the familiar to the unfamiliar topics. It was also hypothesized that learners’ levels of accuracy and fluency when discussing each topic will increase as these learners advance across the different levels of the curriculum. The analysis of the results has partially confirmed the first hypothesis: the more the topic is familiar to the foreign language learners, the higher the level of fluency he will display in the discussion of this topic. However, no systematic relationship has been found to exist between the degree of topic familiarity and variability in learners’ level of accuracy. Moreover, the IV subjects’ levels of fluency and accuracy in the discussion of each topic did not improve as these learners advance across the curriculum.