Assessing the effect of type-written form-focused dialogues on spoken language fluency

We report on a preliminary study which investigated the effect of form vs. meaning focused computer-based type-written activities on spoken communicative skills of learners of German. Both types of activities were realized as written interactions with a computer-based dialogue system and were framed within a “Directions giving” scenario. The linguistic form in focus was the German dative case in prepositional phrases. The paper introduces the methodology we adopt to assess the learners’ language fluency (holistic fluency ratings and temporal measures of speech) and reports on the results of a pilot experiment.