A Longitudinal Study of Pauses in Spoken Performance by Japanese EFL Junior High School Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the developmental features of pauses in spoken performance by Japanese EFL junior high school students. The subjects were 90 Japanese junior high school students who had never been in a foreign country for more than one month. According to their English results in the second term of the ninth grade, they were categorized into three groups: the higher group (N=30), the middle group (N=30), and the lower group (N=30). The spoken data was collected from their six interviews by AET from the third term of the seventh grade to the second term of the ninth grade. The number of unfilled pauses, native-like filled pauses, Japanese filled pauses, and all the pauses were calculated respectively. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures was conducted in each group. The subjects and the material are the same as that of Kosuge (2003). The number of unfilled pauses and the number of Japanese pauses seemed to decrease as a whole. Only the number of native-like pauses increased. Consequently the number of all the pauses did not change a lot. Some of the subjects seemed to utter more native-like fillers as they spoke more fluently.