Boosting Speaking Fluency through Partner Taping
David E. Kluge
&
Matthew A. Taylor

Summary
To give students more fluency practice, students are required to tape conversations outside of class every week. The results of this "partner taping" have been encouraging. Students stay in English while taping, develop greater fluency, gain hours of extra practice, maintain a concrete record of their progress, and get a sense of responsibility for their learning. The teacher also gains a better sense of the students and their language problems. This paper describes the procedures and benefits of partner taping, then points out pitfalls to avoid.
Background and Rationale
For some time, we had been frustrated by the lack of time for open-ended English speaking practice in our once-weekly English oral communication course. We also wanted our students to take more responsibility for their own fluency development outside of class. We were encouraged by the work on student taping of Schneider (1993), and decided to institute our own system of "partner taping" as a supplement to our course, requiring students to record free conversation outside of class and turn in their tapes as homework each week. The results with our students have exceeded our expectations. Students stay in English while taping, and get hours of extra practice, as well as keep a concrete record of their progress. They develop greater fluency and a sense of responsibility for their learning. The teacher gains a better sense of the students and what their language problems may be. Partner taping has become an indispensible component of our course. This paper describes the procedures and benefits of partner taping, then points out some pitfalls to avoid.
Though our experience is with small classes of university English majors in Japan, it may offer a good departure point for interested teachers in other language learning settings, particularly monolingual settings where opportunities for L2 practice outside of class are limited or nonexistent. Our system requires a moderate amount of extra work by the teacher, but the rewards more than repay the additional effort. Our experience also demonstrates the enormous utility of a very "low tech" tool, the small, portable, cassette recorder.
Procedures
Our course is "Speaking 1," an oral communication course in English for first year English majors at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. Classes meet once a week, with approximately twenty students in each class (all female, ranging in ability from lower to upper intermediate). This section explains the procedures for partner taping.
Introducing the System
On the first day of class, students are told that they must tape free conversations outside class and turn the tapes in as homework every week.
The teacher emphasizes that outside taping is a requirement for passing the course, not an option.
The teacher emphasizes the benefits of outside taping in developing fluency, and reports on the favorable experience of previous years` students.
Students are asked to choose taping partners (groups of three are also allowed) for the whole year. (If, as occassionally happens, one partner withdraws from school or taping partners prove incompatible, students may need to find new partners or join another group.)
Students are told to bring to the next class two new blank cassette tapes of precisely the length the teacher specifies.
Students receive a handout (see Appendix A) with these and other requirements (see the section below) which the teacher explains, usually over the first two lessons.
The students must label both tapes and cassette jackets precisely as the teacher specifies. (Labelling should include the day and period of the class, the student`s name and student number, and "W" or "K" to indicate if the tape is the "Working Tape" or "Keepsake Tape"--to be explained below. This information needs to be written on side A and B of the cassette, on the spine of the cassette jacket, and on the front of the cassette jacket. The partner`s name and student number should also be written on the front of the cassette jacket.)
Tape Players and Facilities
Students record on tape recorders which are small (slightly larger than a standard hardcover book), light, portable, relatively inexpensive, easy to operate, and which record clearly. Several dozen recorders are available. Students, sign out a recorder in a notebook, and must sign it back in on the same day. Students must not take the machines off campus. Student taping usually takes place during lunch or free periods, sometimes in empty classrooms or lobbies, but mostly in the lounge area near the English Department.
Tapes
Every week, students fill one side of one tape entirely with free conversation in English. Each student has two tapes, one for recording their first and last conversations of the year in order to evaluate their progress (Tape K), and the other for ongoing taping (Tape W).
Tape K, the "Keepsake Tape," contains the first conversations of the year on Side A. The teacher collects and keeps these tapes until sometime toward the end of the academic year. At that time Tape K is returned to each student and they record their last conversations on Side B. The students,