The Bulletin of Japanese Curriculum Research and Development
Online ISSN : 2424-1784
Print ISSN : 0288-0334
ISSN-L : 0288-0334
The Potential of Oral Reading as a Scaffold for Japanese EFL Learners' Speaking Ability
Michi YONEZAKI
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JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

2012 Volume 35 Issue 1 Pages 31-40

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Abstract

The current study focuses on a new role of oral reading as preparatory practice for speaking, and aims to investigate the relationship between speaking ability and oral reading ability. This study examined a speaking process and an oral reading process carefully. In the speaking process, the lexical and grammatical encoding plays an important role. This study found that it is possible that some similar elements found in the speaking process can be also involved in the oral reading process if we make good use of oral reading. For example, the lexical and grammatical verification is involved in the oral reading process such as "read and look up", and the lexical and grammatical restructuring is involved in the oral reading process such as "personalized oral reading". These oral reading activities raise learners' cognitive load and the process of verification or restructuring is close to the cognitive process which happens in the speaking process. Therefore, the present study leads to the hypothesis that oral reading which raises learners' cognitive load will correlate more with the speaking ability than simple oral reading. The result from our experiment confirmed this hypothesis.

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© 2012 Japan Curriculum Research and Development Association
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