Second language fluency and its underlying cognitive and social determinants

Abstract

In studying second language (L2) fluency attainment, researchers typically address questions about temporal and hesitation phenomena in a descriptive manner, cataloguing which features appear under which learning circumstances. The goal of this paper is to present a perspective on L2 fluency that goes beyond description by exploring a potential explanatory framework for understanding L2 fluency. This framework focuses on the cognitive processing that underlies the manifestation of fluency and disfluency, and on the ways social context might contribute to shaping fluency attainment. The framework provides a dynamical systems perspective of fluency and its development, with specific consequences for a research program on L2 fluency. This framework gives rise to new questions because of its focus on the intimate link between cognitive fluency and utterance fluency, that is, between measures of the speed, efficiency and fluidity of the cognitive processes thought to underlie implementation of the speech act and measures of the oral fluency of that speech act. Moreover, it is argued that cognitive and utterance fluency need to be situated in the social context of communication in order to take into account the role played by the pragmatic and the sociolinguistic nature of communication in shaping L2 fluency development.

What Features Best Characterize Adult Second Language Utterance Fluency and What Do They Reveal About Fluency Gains in Short-Term Immersion?

“…A third limitation is that silent pauses were defined here in terms of a minimum threshold of 400 ms. This particular choice is supported in the literature, but it is not the only possible choice (De Jong & Bosker, 2013;Segalowitz, 2016). It is not obvious to us that lowering the threshold to, say, 250 ms from 400 ms would have changed the results meaningfully in this study, but it is important to use an appropriate threshold for defining silent pauses.…”

“…The narrowing down of the number of temporal measures on which to focus is important because it will facilitate research aimed at linking temporal aspects of cognitive fluency, the speed and efficiency of the executive control processes underlying speech production, to utterance fluency, the fluidity of actual speech (Segalowitz, 2016). The discovery of specific links between cognitive fluency and utterance fluency will ultimately contribute to a broader understanding of L2 fluency and how to overcome the challenges learners face in fluency attainment (Segalowitz, 2010).…”

“…We define fluency here more narrowly in terms of temporal and hesitation phenomena that characterize the fluidity of speech delivery. These phenomena are also known as features of "utterance fluency" (Segalowitz, 2010(Segalowitz, , 2016. This narrower definition does help to reduce, somewhat, the scope of what the term fluency might refer to, but even so, researchers still face the task of figuring out on which of many potential features to focus (e.g., see De Jong, Steinel, Florijn, Schoonen, & Hulstijn, 2012;Kormos, 2006;Segalowitz, 2010).…”

“…For this feature, a minimum silence threshold had to be set for defining what counts as fluency-related silence as opposed to linguistically-related silence not reflective of fluency as such (e.g., silence normally occurring after stop consonants; Zellner, 1994). See also De Jong and Bosker (2013) and Segalowitz (2016) for more on this issue. The minimum threshold used here was 400 ms, based on past practice (Freed, Segalowitz, & Dewey, 2004;Ginther et al, 2010;Iwashita, Brown, McNamara, & O'Hagan, 2008;Lennon, 1990).…”

Teaching speaking

“…Fluency has been analyzed quantitatively (Lennon, 1990) as speech temporal phenomenon (Schmidt, 1992) with a focus on automatization, speech rate and length of pauses, but also qualitatively as increasing length of linguistic units (mean length of runs (MLR), Towell, Hawkins & Bazergui, 1996). More recently, fluency is perhaps seen as a dynamic notion comprising the underlying cognitive mechanisms and the social environment (Segalowitz, 2016). This type of cognitive fluency (Segalowitz, 2010) with proceduralization may be related to indepth learning and overall development of proficiency.…”