Working memory training and its effects on oral proficiency in English: implications to automatically graded speaking tests

按计划在第一学期和第二学期进行13次工作记忆训练前后，记录对照组和实验组约40名学生的话语。这些话语被转录并分析其复杂性、准确性和流畅性。第一学期的结果显示任务效应，即引发学习者说话的问题出乎意料地影响了表现。因此，工作记忆训练的效果只能推断，因为预期效果和任务效果是分不开的。通过第二学期的数据记录，对学生的言语变化进行了更详细的分析。复杂性（句法复杂性和句子长度）的提高与流利度之间没有显著的相关性，这意味着句子变得更长而不牺牲流利度。另一方面，复杂性的变化与错误数量之间存在显著的相关性，这意味着复杂性和准确性之间存在权衡效应。在流利性方面，前测结果与测试前后的流利性得分差异呈显著负相关（r=- 0.59），表明学生最初的流利程度越高，这些练习的效果越差。

Utterances of about forty students in the control and experimental groups were recorded before and after the 13 working memory training sessions in the first and second semesters as planned. The utterances are transcribedand analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency. The results of the first semester showed task effects, namely, the questions that elicited learner speech unexpectedly influenced the performance. Therefore, the effects of the working memory training could be only inferred since the expected effects could not be separated from the task effects. With the data recorded in the second semester, the changes in students’speech were analyzed more in detail. There were no significant correlations between the improvement in complexity (syntactic complexity and sentence length) and fluency, meaning that sentences became longer without sacrificing fluency. On the other hand,significant correlation was found between the changes in complexity and in number of errors, implying a tradeoff effect between complexity and accuracy.As for fluency, there was significant negative correlation between the results of the pre-test and the difference in fluency scores between pre-and post-tests (r=-.59), indicating that the more fluent the students were initially, the less effective these practices were.