Do Student Perceptions of Fluency Gains Match the Empirical Evidence?

This paper follows up on a previous study that sought to ascertain student perceptions about English Discussion Class (EDC) lessons.Those results, based on a sample of almost 100 Rikkyo University students, clearly indicated that the participants felt considerably more positive about the EDC course and its individual lesson activities at the end of the Spring Semester than at the very beginning.The vast majority of these students also indicated that they felt their fluency and confidence when speaking English had improved over the course of the fourteen-lesson semester.The aim of the current study, however, was to find out whether such intuitions are borne out by empirical evidence.Some selected group discussions, from near the beginning and end of the semester, were videotaped and analysed for this purpose.Results indicated that, both in terms of rate of speech and hesitation phenomena, fluency gains were indeed made in all cases.This offers some tangible support for the perceptions of the students themselves.