A STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF TOPIC FAMILIARITY ON FOREIGN LANGUAGE SPEAKING PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Activities with distinct design characteristics. Nevertheless, there has been a lack of comprehensive research into the roles played by different types of tasks. To address that gap, this study used CAF (complexity, accuracy, and fluency) to evaluate sixty ESL students' oral performance and examined how task repetition and subject familiarity impacted their results. Four monologic tasks were given to participants after they were interviewed using stimulated recollection. The results show that by doing the same tasks repeatedly, participants could improve their CAF and use known content to create speech with increased structural complexity. Task repetition, which emphasizes grammatical encoding and lexical options, and topic familiarity appear to facilitate conceptualization. An additional way to enhance CAF was to restate previously discussed content. Since content familiarity and task repetition are two components of topic familiarity, these results suggest that instructors may wish to consider utilising task repetition to acquaint students with new subjects.