The Effects of Repeated Oral Summarization on the Learners’ IL Performance and Summary Quality

The present study examined the effect of repeated oral summary of written texts on the three aspects of interlanguage performance and the summary quality. Six university students summarized the two types of text, argumentative and expository, to three different hearers in dyads repeatedly. The argumentative text was assumed to be cognitively more demanding in its content with more causal reasoning than the expository text and so was expected to elicit more complex language along with more accurate language, according to Robinson’s (2007) cognition hypothesis. On the other hand, task repetition was hypothesized to improve complexity, accuracy and fluency of interlanguage performance by reducing the cognitive load for message generation in particular. Findings are (1) argumentative text resulted in more complex IL but expository text resulted in more accurate IL, without difference in fluency, (2) task repetition resulted in higher fluency in both texts, and (3) summary quality did not change by text type or repetition. Results partly support Robinson (2007) and partly support Skehan (1998, 2007). Simultaneous development of three aspects of IL seems improbable through the present study.