Applied Linguistics 28/2: 309315 Oxford University Press 2007 doi:10.

1093/applin/aml057 Advance Access Published on 4 April 2007

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Enhancing Automaticity Through Task-based Language Learning

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ISABELLE DE RIDDER, 2LIEVE VANGEHUCHTEN, and 3 MEZ A GO MARTA SESEN

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Flemish Council for Education, 2University of Antwerp, 3University of Salamanca In general terms automaticity could be dened as the subconscious condition wherein we perform a complex series of tasks very quickly and efciently, without having to think about the various components and subcomponents of action involved (DeKeyser 2001: 125). For language learning, Segalowitz (2003) characterised automaticity as a more efcient, more accurate, and more stable performance. As such, automaticity is often associated with systematicity and a merely instructional approach. However, task-based learning seems not incompatible with automaticity either, since it incorporates activities that respect transfer-appropriate processing and other positive features of communicative practices (Segalowitz 2003: 402) and thus allows students to creatively apply previously acquired knowledge in new communicative contexts. In order to test this assumption, an experiment was conducted at Antwerp University with a group of intermediate-level students of Spanish. Two groups were evaluated: an experimental group and a control group. The control group attended a traditional communicative course, whereas the experimental groups course had a task-based component built into it. The results of the experiment indicate that the experimental group outperformed the control group for automatization (as dened by a number of criteria).

RESEARCH AIMS AND RATIONALE

Automaticity is a concept that seems to rapidly win ground in language learning theory. Segalowitz (2003) denes automaticity for language learning as a more efcient, more accurate and more stable performance. Moreover, an advanced level of automaticity seems to lead to near-native performance (DeKeyser 2001; Hulstijn 2002). Even though empirical research on automaticity is still in its early stages, research in cognitive psychology as well as in second language acquisition suggests that automaticity is best achieved by repeated creative use of the language rules taught in a context of authentic communication (DeKeyser 2003). From this point of view, a communicative task-based approach offers several advantages, since this language learning method allows students to creatively transfer previously

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n acquired knowledge to new communicative contexts (Nunan 1989; Zano 1999; Nation 2001; Robinson 2001). In order to examine whether the taskbased approach indeed offers the appropriate setting to enhance automaticity, an experiment was conducted with 68 intermediate-level students of Spanish as a foreign language for Business and Economics.

HYPOTHESIS
In the task-based approach, the students task guarantees that the linguistic contents, although vital to the development of the exercise, do not determine its structure. Instead, the class is process-oriented: the focus is on the process that underlies the successful completion of the task. In this way, the taskbased approach avoids the pitfalls of the traditional communicative method, such as the lack of systematic revision, of student-centred activities, and of authentic communicative settings. In other words, the task-based approach allows structured repetition and creative transfer of knowledge items. Therefore, we hypothesized that the task-based approach leads to a higher level of automaticity than the traditional communicative approach. We have dened automaticity by a number of criteria (see below) and expected the task-based approach to increase results on all of these criteria.

METHOD
Design
The control group took a one-year integrated course where knowledge items were introduced indirectly, further assimilated in a focus-on-form phase, and nally practised in a course-content related communicative situation. As far as the experimental group is concerned, we varied the transfer conditions with a task-based component: the so-called pra cticas comunicativas. Through creative skill training activities, students engaged in different communicative situations, unrelated to the actual course but organized in such a way that the participants were compelled to use the previously acquired lexico-grammar. Both groups were evaluated on their level of automaticity after completion of the course.

Subjects
A total of 68 students participated in the experiment: 35 in the control group and 33 in the experimental group (30 male students (13 in the control group and 17 in the experimental group) and 38 female (22 in the control group and 16 in the experimental group)). The subjects were assigned randomly to the two groups. They were all between 20 and 23 years of age. The subjects were students of business and economics at the University

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of Antwerp. During the experiment, they were in the third year of a fouryear programme in Economics. Their native tongue is Dutch, and they had all passed the beginners course Spanish for Business and Economics. The overall beginners oral exam results of both groups did not differ signicantly (t-test analysis).

Course materials
The rst three stages of the course coincided for both the experimental and the control group and this tted in with the concept of a communicative course with a strong systematic or focus-on-form component: presentation, explanation, exercises. The fourth stage was different in that the control group used the acquired knowledge in a similar context, whereas the experimental group creatively applied the acquired knowledge to a new context. This meant that besides the classes and the related homework, the students of the control group were asked to compose an individual dossier. For this, they had to read 12 texts on Spanish companies drawn from the specialist business press. Next, in preparation of an oral test, the students were invited to independently further gather information for the dossier and to prepare a brief presentation of each of these companies. The experimental group followed the same course as the control group, but without the individual assignment. Instead, a fourth task-based phase was added: the pra cticas comunicativas. The nal objective was to shoot an advertising spot for a brand new product. Each workshop addressed a specic aspect of the task, and the students were invited to draw on their knowledge of the world as well as on their specialist-economic background and (meta)linguistic knowledge of Spanish in order to do so.

Instrumentation and observation

In the case of both groups, automaticity was graded for the two oral discourses: the oral examination and the advertisement. Automaticity is a vast concept; it has many different facets. Since it affects all aspects of language learning at once (Segalowitz 2003), we have dened the assessment criteria on the basis of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (2001). These criteria were adjusted to the specic purposes of the course and, in a more concrete manner, to what was supposed to be acquired knowledge after completing the course successfully.1 The main criteria were: pronunciation, uency,2 intonation, sociolinguistic competence, lexical competence, and grammatical competence. Each of these criteria was broken into discrete sub-criteria:   Pronunciation: distinctness, intelligibility, naturalness; Fluency: pauses, reformulating phrases, llers, recurrences;

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Intonation: clearness, intelligibility, naturalness, melodic phrasing; /usted; Sociolinguistic adequacy: adjustment to the situation, use of tu Lexicon: mastery of the core vocabulary, lexical adjustment to the situation, use of phraseology, richness of the lexicon; Grammar: morphology and syntax of the present and past tenses, use of the pronouns, use of ser/estar, use of por/para, use of prepositions, use of concordance rules.

Two independent raters used video-recordings to evaluate the oral performances of both groups for each of these (sub-)criteria. Scores are on a scale of 1 to 4 (0 stands for not applicable, 1 for insufcient, 2 for sufcient, 3 for good, and 4 for outstanding). The agreement between the scores of both raters was measured by computing the Pearson Product Correlation Coefcients. For all criteria, these coefcients lay between .900 and .998 (signicant at the .01 level). For the purposes of the present analysis, both evaluators decided on one nal score. The scores were added up per major evaluation criterion in order to obtain six nal percentages (calculated on the basis of a maximum score).3

Procedure
Both the control and the experimental group took two classes of fty minutes on a weekly basis during two terms of twelve weeks each. There was a gap of seven weeks between the two terms. In addition, the students of the experimental group attended the pra cticas comunicativas: ve times 60 minutes per term, so 10 hours in total. The control group followed exactly the same schedule, with the exception of the 10 hours of pra cticas comunicativas, which, in their case, were replaced by individual preparation towards an oral examination (see above).

RESULTS
Table 1 describes the statistics for the six major criteria, expressed in percentages. The results were analysed with an independent samples t-test. All statistical tests were performed at .05 level. The results indicate that: (a) The control group outperformed the experimental group on pronunciation [t (66) 3.53, p (two tailed) .001] and intonation [t (66) 2.73, p (two tailed) .008]. This contradicts the hypothesis. (b) The experimental group outperformed the control group on grammar [t (66) 6.06, p (two tailed) .000], vocabulary [t (66) 5.51, p (two tailed) .000], and social adequacy [t (66) 5.52, p (two tailed) .000]. This was hypothesized. (c) No signicant difference could be established on uency. This also contradicts the hypothesis.

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Table 1: Descriptive statistics of the results on the six major criteria in percentage
Criterion Pronunciation Intonation Grammar Vocabulary Social adequacy Fluency Condition Control Experimental Control Experimental Control Experimental Control Experimental Control Experimental Control Experimental Mean 74.76 58.58 70.71 54.92 63.27 88.89 65.89 91.18 68.57 85.92 67.50 74.00 SD 22.28 14.36 23.02 24.59 18.18 16.59 23.64 11.90 29.61 22.48 24.47 25.74 Min. 25.00 33.33 25.00 25.00 28.94 43.75 25.00 44.44 25.00 25.00 25.00 25.00 Max. 100.00 83.33 100.00 100.00 89.47 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 N 35 33 35 33 35 33 35 33 35 33 35 33

DISCUSSION
As far as the knowledge items (lexicon and grammar) and the level of sociolinguistic competence are concerned, the experimental group signicantly outperformed the control group. Nevertheless, with regard to uency, no signicant difference could be established. As far as the criteria of pronunciation and intonation are concerned, the control group signicantly outperformed the experimental group. Since we expected outperformance by the experimental group on all of the criteria, these results partly contradict our hypothesis. The lack of difference at the level of uency might be explained by the fact that the discourse that was presented to evaluate the experimental and the control groups was to a considerable extent prepared and studied in advance. This may explain the absence of reformulating phrases, pauses, llers, etc., which normally characterize spoken discourse and determine the level of uency. The fact that the control group outperformed the experimental group on pronunciation and intonation might be due to the fact that in the experimental group the students are each others conversational partner, whereas the students of the control group during their oral examination enter into a conversation with the evaluator, a native or near-native speaker. In the case of the experimental group, a possible explanation is therefore that the L2-learner will not run counter to the L2-accent of his fellow students and that this has a reinforcing effect on the non-native level

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of this group (pronunciation and intonation). In contrast, it seems plausible that the students of the control group will try their utmost during the ofcial exam to adjust their speech to that of the evaluator. Further experimental settings should therefore take into account the nature of the dyad.

CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH

The initial hypothesis seems to have been partially conrmed. The experimental group only outperforms the control group for the criteria of social adequacy and grammatical and lexical knowledge. Therefore, the conclusion can be drawn that the task-based approach stimulates the process of automatization to a larger extent than a purely communicative course with a strong systematic component. However, given the very different nature of the task-based approach, the question could also be posed to what extent the better performance of the experimental group is not due mostly to a higher motivation, and, if such is the case, whether this motivation is an intrinsic part of the task-based approach, as has been suggested by Estaire (1999). Thus, the question whether each task-based activity in se is able to arouse enough motivation and inuence the automatization process in the same way, needs further examination. Moreover, the results presented here are preliminary: more research is needed in which the different criteria are isolated, so that their exact relation to each other and to the automatization process can be established. The experiment reported upon took place in a specic learning environment over a specic period of time. It remains to be seen if different settings (different languages, contexts, language levels, etc.) and testing over a longer term will corroborate the above results. One nal consideration concerns the psychological similarity between the learning context and the transfer context. Research has shown that the greater the psychological similarity of the learning and transfer contexts, the higher the degree of automaticity (Segalowitz 2003). Given the fact that the basic principle of the task-based approach is to offer not new contents but only new contexts, which moreover are being created mostly by the students themselves, it can be stated that the psychological similarity between the learning context and the transfer context is considerable within this approach. Therefore, we share the opinion of Segalowitz (2003: 402) that future research will have to determine which dimensions of psychological similarity (e.g. whether the learners intentions, feelings, etc., are important, or whether only linguistic contexts are important) are relevant to the establishment of automaticity that is transferable to new situations.

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NOTES
1 If the student passes the course Spanish for Business and Economics Intermediate Level, his/her competence can be put on a par with the European C1-level in the matter of reading prociency, and with the B2-level in respect of the remaining skills. 2 Although automaticity is often considered to be a part of uency (for instance Wood 2001), there is no foregone conclusion on what is the connection between both concepts in a second language acquisition context (Segalowitz 2003: 384). In this report, uency is considered as a criterion for determining the progress in the automatization process, and is dened as the ability in the second language to produce or comprehend utterances smoothly, rapidly and accurately (ibid.), without the concept of automaticity being made subordinate to the concept of uency. 3 The 0 scores were counted as missing.

REFERENCES
Council of Europe. 2001. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. DeKeyser, R. M. 2001. Automaticity and automatization in P. Robinson (ed.): Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 12551. DeKeyser, R. M. 2003. Implicit and explicit learning in C. J. Doughty and M. H. Long (eds): The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell, pp. 31348. Estaire, S. 1999. Tareas para el desarrollo de un nomo y participativo in aprendizaje auto n (ed.): La ensen J. Zano anza del espan ol mediante tareas. Madrid: Edinumen, pp. 5372. Hulstijn, J. 2002. Towards a unified account of the representation, processing and acquisition of second-language knowledge. Second Language Research 18/3: 193223. Nation, I. S. P. 2001. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nunan, D. 1989. Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, P. 2001. Task complexity, cognitive resources, and syllabus design: a triadic framework for examining task influences on SLA in P. Robinson (ed.): Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 287318. Segalowitz, N. 2003. Automaticity and second languages in C. J. Doughty and M. H. Long (eds): The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Malden/Oxford/Carlton: Blackwell, pp. 382408. Wood, D. 2001. In search of fluency: what is it and how can we teach it? Canadian Modern Language Review 57/4: 57389. n, J. 1999. La ensen Zano anza del espan ol mediante tareas. Madrid: Edinumen.