A Longitudinal Study of ESL Learners' Fluency and Comprehensibility Development
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This longitudinal mixed-methods study compared the oral fluency of well-educated adult immigrants from Mandarin and Slavic language backgrounds (16 per group) enrolled in introductory English as a second language (ESL) classes. Speech samples were collected over a 2-year period, together with estimates of weekly English use. We also conducted interviews at the last data collection session. The participants’ fluency and comprehensibility at three points over 22 months were judged by 33 native speakers of English. We examine the learners’ progress in light of their exposure to English outside of their ESL class. The Slavic language speakers showed a small but significant improvement in both fluency and comprehensibility, whereas the Mandarin speakers’ performance did not change over 2 years, although both groups started at the same level of oral proficiency. These differences may be attributable in part to degree of exposure to English outside the ESL courses. Neither group had extensive exposure outside of their classes because of employment and familial responsibilities (although the Slavic language speakers reported more opportunities). Thus both groups may have been disadvantaged by a lack of oral fluency instruction. The findings, both quantitative and qualitative, are interpreted using the Willingness to Communicate framework; we also discuss implications for the language classroom.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it