A Reappraisal of the 4/3/2 Activity

Abstract

In the 4/3/2 activity learners deliver the same talk three times under increasing time pressure. The activity is intended first and foremost to foster fluency, but accuracy and complexity have also been said to benefit from this activity. The present study investigates whether immediate repetition of monologues under increasing time pressure really brings about linguistic improvements beyond fluency. Ten adult ESL learners delivered two talks three times, one talk with and the other without increasing time pressure. Fluency improved under both task conditions, but the potential of task repetition to bring about improvements in accuracy appeared to be compromised by the increasing time pressure. A strikingly high amount of verbatim duplication of word strings from the participants’ first version of their monologues in subsequent versions helps to account for the fluency gains and also for the lack of improvement in other linguistic aspects.