Investigating the Differences Between Prepared and Spontaneous Speech Characteristics: Descriptive Approach

In the modern EFL paradigm, pre-task planning time is viewed as a norm. Pre-task planning time is one of the central concerns of teachers, test-developers, as well as researchers. Pre-task planning is planning a speech before performing a task, and it also involves rehearsal and strategic planning. The paper addresses the problem of pre-task planning advisability for A2 Russian EFL speakers. The research presented in this paper examines the structure, breakdown, repair, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity as well as the accuracy of the discourse produced by 145 Russian participants of the English language competition held in Kazan, Russia, in January 2020. The discourse analysis revealed that the pre-task time is used by A2 EFL speakers not only to focus on a dialog but also to elicit a topic text from memory, thus focusing on form rather than meaning. Hence, in A2 tests prioritizing meaning over form and measuring the ability for spontaneous speech, the one-minute pre-task planning time is viewed as questionable

Features of Speech Reactions to Mental State Concepts

The article is devoted to the problem of mental state associative speech representation. The study involved 31 Russian-speaking subjects (27 females and 4 males) at the age of 18 - 22 years old. The experimental procedure using DMDX program allowed to measure the time of speech response to stimuli - the concepts of 25 mental states. The average reaction time to the concepts of mental states, shown on the computer monitor, made 2114.68 milliseconds. The most rapid associative speech response was the response to the following stimuli: "ecstasy" (1452.54 msec), "meditation" (1569.26 msec), "tranquility" (1685.21 msec), the slowest response is the response to "interest" (2517.5 msec) and "indecision" (2454.63 msec). In total, 448 associations were given to the concepts of 25 mental states by tested subjects - speech reactions, i.e. 17.9 associations per mental state on the average. The greatest number of speech associations (24) was given to the concept of love. The smallest number was given to the concept of ecstasy (11 associations). Associative fields of mental states (meditation, ecstasy, melancholy, tiredness, loneliness) have the most pronounced core. The prospects of the study consist in the performance of a similar associative experiment among the representatives of another culture, as well as in the studying of an estimated and situational associative representation of mental states