Increasing fluency in L2 writing with singing

Fluency is an essential part of a language learner’s skills. Despite various studieson fluency, little is known about the effects of different pedagogical methodson the development of written fluency. In this paper, we examine howdifferent pedagogical methods affect the development of second languagelearners’ written fluency. Participants in this study were 51 language learnersenrolled in two intensive Finnish courses. The pedagogical methods investigatedin the study were singing, listening to songs, and reciting lyrics of songs.Written stories based on cartoon strips were used as a pretest and a posttest.The fluency of written stories was analyzed based on the number of wordsused in the texts. Differences between the groups taught by different pedagogicalmethods were analyzed. The results seem to indicate that fluency increasedthe most in the singing groups compared to the other groups. Therewas also a statistically significant difference between the singing group andthe group reciting lyrics, as well as between the group listening to songs andthe group reciting lyrics.