Online Learning, Fluency, and Dysfluency
José Cruz and Robert Long
In the first half of the presentation, José discussed how traditional textbooks and classroom materials often fail to expose students to authentic spoken English conversation due to the limitations of the textbook medium and the tendency for instructors to use a "teacher" voice rather than a natural voice when addressing students in the classroom. He then introduced a website he developed to provide learners with authentic spoken English covering a variety of topics that aims to teach more natural forms of pronunciation and speech patterns. In the second half of the presentation, Robert summarized the results of a study conducted at his institution to explore gender differences in fluency and dysfluency of Japanese university students. Robert and his colleagues developed a corpus constructed from over 100 conversations between male and female students in order to analyze in detail trends in speech rate, pauses, conversational gambits and a variety of other linguistic traits. The study suggests that men tend to often unconsciously control conversations while female students often remain passive as evidenced by the data collected. Robert suggested that these trends could be contributing to the falling marriage and birth rates of the overall population in Japan and that further study would be necessary to develop methods for remedying this societal problem.
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