The Development of Oral Production in Content-based Second Language Courses at the University of Ottawa

Abstract

This article presents a study focusing on the oral production of students enrolled in adjunct or content-based ESL and FSL language courses linked to an introductory psychology course. The two-year study measured changes in students' oral production over two semesters during the 90-minute-per-week adjunct course. Instruments used were an elicited imitation exercise and a discussion task administered at the beginning and end of the course. These were recorded in the language laboratory for later analysis. The elicited imitation task was corrected for accuracy and for the presence of certain prosodic, syntactic, and discourse features. The discussion task scored on content, speed of delivery, pronunciation, grammatical accuracy, and precision of vocabulary. A detailed qualitative analysis was done on the discussions produced by a subgroup of students who had shown gains in grammatical accuracy. The authors discuss the results of the study and its implications for the teaching of oral production in content-based language courses.