Improving EFL Students’ Speech Fluency in Oral Narrative

Abstract

This action research focuses on the improvement of speech fluency of the participants by retelling the picture book ‘Frog, Where are you?’ as their oral narratives. There were two cycles of the activity implementation for the participants after they produced the first oral narratives without any prior learning (this period was called pre-cycle). The activity implementation consisting of lecture, video sessions, and discussion were conducted to improve the participants’ speech fluency before each oral narrative collections. The participants had to retell the stories of the videos in video sessions.At the end of each cycle, the participants were required to retell ‘Frog, Where are you?’ Theoral narratives were analyzed bythree major sections: temporal fluency variables, disfluency markers, and places of pauses. The results of the research found that the participants improve their speech fluency due to the increasing right places of pauses in their oral narratives while the disfluency markers were rarely occurred in their oral narratives.