A study on the lexical richness of ESL learners in their oral task performances across different styles of classroom input

Abstract

The present research is interdisciplinary as it examines related areas of sociolinguistics, literacy, multimodality, and English Language Teaching (ELT). It is built on the research gap that, in the newlinepresence of existing inequalities, the closure of secondary schools due to COVID-19 further exacerbates educational inequalities. Therefore, the researcher discusses the need for a revision in curriculum, policy, and pedagogy related to English language education in India. The revisions are focused on English language education in general and the improvement of speaking skills in particular owing to speaking skills given little or no mileage in Indian curricula. The target population is adolescent ESL speakers since this demographic constitutes the most significant dropout ratio in the country. Based on the classification of teaching situations according to the NCERT Position Paper (2005), this thesis focuses on three types of schools (Types 2 4) where newlineinequalities are more prominent as per previous literature. The main task of the research consisted of taking three types of classroom input (Text A: digital comic, Text B: audio-visual, and Text C: audio-note), and the students were instructed to retell the newlinestory along with the moral as they comprehended it. Each text was introduced to the participants at two-week intervals. Thus, the study has four objectives that are guided by the mixed methods research design of exploratory sequential method where quantitative data is complemented by newlinequalitative data. First, the researcher acknowledges one valid type-token ratio out of eight ratios that does not depend on speakers usage of tokens. Identifying the Moving Average Type-toToken Ratio (MATTR) as the most credible measure for short oral productions follows a study of the utility of MATTR as a measure of language assessment in bilingual classrooms.