Republic of uzbekistan fergana state university

students progress in fluency:

On the pre-test, students' speech delivery was slow and utterances were

characterized by frequent pauses and hesitations that impeded communication and

strained the listener. Sometimes, delivery became so slow that only few words were produced.

Noticeably, on the posttest, students could express themselves fluently and

smoothly with few pauses and hesitation. This indicated that the experimental group students achieved progress in their fluency after the program application. The highest effect size was in students' performance in "exchanging personal

information" task. This may be due to the fact that this function was closely related

to students' every day life and was practiced more than other functions in class.

Actually, the progress realized in fluency can be attributed to many factors

that occurred at the pre-task stage, during task stage or post task stage.

At the pre-task stage, students were encouraged, via teaching, to use

prefabricated and lexical language in an automatic way, which was better than

structuring each utterance form scratch and hence slowing the rate of speech. These phrases required less thinking and planning on the part of the learner because they were used as wholes. In addition, exposing students to authentic samples of spoken language helped them identify lexical phrases (poly words, phrasal constraints or sentence builders) used by native speakers to express ideas. These encouraged them to use such phrases to express structures they were not yet able to construct creatively which eased frustration and promoted fluency.

Furthermore, providing learners with adequate time to plan in advance helped

them think of the content and meaning to be conveyed and this resulted in greater

fluency during actual task performance. It also helped them handle communicative

strains and pressures thus increasing their speech and decreasing total pausing time. During the task, students were highly motivated to speak as they could practice risk taking without being afraid of mistakes. They indulged in real situations and

employed all their linguistic, discourse and pragmatic repertoire in real time without hesitation or interruption by the teacher. In other words, the results of the analysis that the students were exposed to at the pre-task stage was reintegrated in their fluent performance. Students were not asked to conform to the use of certain

structures but use whatever language they had which helped them achieve more

fluency and use cutting edge language structures. Moreover, giving students

adequate not too much time to do the task, trained them to plan for their speech online to convey their message as fast as possible without undue pauses or long

periods of thinking.

At the post task stage, the self-evaluation activity helped students monitor

their speech rate, their hesitation and their pauses.

Finally, activities presented at the "reflection and consolidation stage" after the

students finished the task was very effective in that domain.