Context and contact in the development of oral proficiency

Seventy-two Chinese learners of English participated in the study, 33 in the United Kingdom and 39 in China. Each completed seven tasks in English and a language contact questionnaire, once at the start of their master’s program and once six months later. The seven tasks assessed overall oral proficiency and the linguistic knowledge and processing that underpin speech production. Small statistically significant differences were observed across the contexts at Time 2 on the three linguistic processing tasks, when performance at Time 1 was controlled for. Interestingly, the more the learners studying in the United Kingdom reported using the target language, the more slowly they completed the sentence inflection and agreement task, while the more the learners studying in China reported using the target language, the more quickly they completed the task. Type of language contact (i.e., reading, writing, speaking, or listening) is explored as a possible explanation for this novel finding.