Congratulations to the new PhD Donata Lisaitė on the successful defence of her doctoral dissertation English as a Foreign Language in the Context of Integrated Subject and Foreign Language Learning: Effective Task Design for Students’ Fluency (Education Sciences (S 007), supervisors – prof. dr. Brigita Janiūnaitė (Kaunas University of Technology, Social Sciences, Education, S 007) and prof. dr. Tom F. H. Smiths (University of Antwerp, Belgium, Social Sciences, Education, S 007)), and obtained a doctor  degree of Social Sciences in the field  Education.

The dissertation is available at:
Kaunas University of Technology Library ( 50 Gedimino  St , Kaunas)

The dissertation is available at:
https://ktu.edu/mokslas/doktorantura/disertaciju-gynimas/

A  brief annotation of the dissertation is presented below:

Fluency is one of the most frequently expressed aspirations when learning a foreign language. Changes in the tradition of language pedagogy have led to more effective ways of teaching languages. At the end of the 20th century, task-based language teaching (TBLT) was proposed.
The main research question is: Which task design in the context of content-based instruction (CBI) is most effective for achieving fluency in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing? A quasi-experiment was conducted to test which criteria of the task as a construct are conducive to achieving writing fluency; the criteria proposed by Ellis and Shintani (2014) for defining a task were chosen as the basis for the task design. Data were collected and analysed using the keystroke logging tool Inputlog; quantitative (i.e. metadata of keystrokes made by participants) and qualitative (i.e. written texts as products) data were collected. The study included 121 participants from three study programmes. The quantitative analysis was carried out on the basis of metadata generated by the Inputlog tool. Based on descriptive statistics, similar trends were found in all the study programmes in terms of fluency as a product (i.e. text length and production rate) and fluency as a process (i.e. P-flow length, pause time). Statistical analysis revealed that the task design criterion Gap is crucial for fluency, but statistical analysis did not confirm that the task structure criterion Meaning focus is favourable for fluency.