Action Research Constructs

Retrieved from Google images on May 30, 2010

 I have reflected upon the learners' problems to communicate accurately when they get to a pre-intermediate level. I have chosen to make emphasis in accuracy when students use the past tenses basically because this is one of the most troublesome aspects of L2 that learners have to deal with during their learning processes. I have read that most of the time that fossilization occurs when the listener accepts the speaker's utterances without making any necessary corrective feedback on their errors and/or mistakes (Virgil & Oller cited by Brown, 2007); therefore, I suspect that listeners can also contribute to the speakers' progress in terms of accuracy if properly trained. Krashen (2007), on the other hand, believes that learners should monitor or edit their mistakes until they have thoroughly acquired the concept; this could be either done by peer or self correction. However, people do not generally correct each other grammar errors during a face-to-face interaction because they mainly focus on meaning and also because they do not want to seem rude in front of the speaker. As a consequence, speakers think that they are being accurate because such feedback is non-existent.

Since I usually work with voice message forums mostly for fluency, I have come up with the idea of implementing one of these applications a monitoring tool to improve accuracy in the past tenses during communicative events. The following are the constructs in which my research is going to be based on:

• Speaking skills

(accuracy)

• Monitoring strategies (peer and self-correction)

• Message voice forums