ELT Journal Advance Access published online on November 3, 2009
ELT Journal, doi:10.1093/elt/ccp081
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Students transcribing tasks: noticing fluency, accuracy, and complexity
The authors are members of the Basic English Proficiency Project, a group of teachers from the English Language Institute at Kanda University of International Studies that conducts research every year aimed at improving the Freshman English curriculum. For the year-long study outlined here, the members familiarized themselves with task-based language teaching literature as they searched for ways to build a focus on fluency, accuracy, and complexity into communicative language activities. Members contributed to the project through classroom trials of transcription tasks, collaborative analysis of the final data collected, and writing sections of this paper
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Abstract |
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Student self-transcription can greatly enhance the power of tasks to promote language learning, for it allows students to re-examine their experience freed from the pressure of performing the task itself, so they can notice and reflect on the language used and encountered. This is a powerful step in language development because it allows for increased awareness and informed goal setting. Students can thus become researchers into their own language use, with their transcriptions offering teachers an efficient means of tracking their performances. This article shares findings gleaned from the implementation of a self-transcription activity that followed a poster presentation task, in which post-task reflection had the students assess their transcribed language according to simplified measures of fluency, accuracy, and complexity. In the closing, alternative means of adapting such work to suit a range of classroom conditions and purposes will be discussed.