by Brynn Ladd Loquaciousness in Persons Whose Native Tongue is Not the One Spoken in America Fluency in ESL Speakers

Proposed Outcome Hypothesis An English as a Second Language (ESL) speaker's creative ability in language is an accurate measure of fluency.

System of Experimentation Methodology Participants 2 experiment variations Based on the Hasbro game Taboo

Word-guessing Party Activity The Game Taboo Players are required to explain a target word No gestures are used (unlike Charades)‏ The target word or a variant of it may not be said (i.e. target: reread, neither reread, nor read may be said)‏

Experiment 3 ESL Speakers 1 native English listeners 10 words Comparing the variety of the speakers to each other, when the reference listener is control Interesting results

Example Speaker 1 (5 yrs) – its a flying mammal, its probably the only flying mammal I know of, it's related to a action movie that recently came out and everybody appears to like it, the dark knight, so I guess people can guess what this word is Speaker 2 (11 yrs) – I think it can be, it's a baseball stick, it can be used for playing baseball, and I'm not sure but it can also be a rat with wings Speaker 3 (16 yrs) – let's see, it's an animal that can fly, and it's like, I don't know, many people associate it with vampires

Example Speaker 1 (5 yrs) – its a flying mammal, its probably the only flying mammal I know of, it's related to a action movie that recently came out and everybody appears to like it, the dark knight, so I guess people can guess what this word is Speaker 2 (11 yrs) – I think it can be, it's a baseball stick, it can be used for playing baseball, and I'm not sure but it can also be a rat with wings Speaker 3 (16 yrs) – let's see, it's an animal that can fly, and it's like, I don't know, many people associate it with vampires Word: bat

Trends Noticed There was more variety The speakers applied to general, rather than personal things More likely to include more definitions

Scoring 1 point correct definition 1 point multiple definitions 1 point general application 1 point application to listener 1 point keyword

Results Speaker 1 (5 yrs): 22 Speaker 2 (11 yrs): 19 Speaker 3 (16 yrs): 14 Interesting note: Knowing them personally, it was interesting how their personalities came out.

Research to be done at a time not in the present or past Future Work Experiments:  have multiple people score each speaker, average  distraction free environment Expand the participant group Compare against standardized fluency test Focus the experiment: language, years studying See which version of double-stress words is more common

The Point Where the Presentation Terminates The end.