The Influence of Cognitive, Affective, and Sociocultural Individual Differences on L2 Chinese Speech Performance: A Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes Approach

Understanding Individual Differences in Metacognitive Strategy Use, Task Demand, and Performance in Integrated L2 Speaking Assessment Tasks

“…Data preparation yielded 95 valid samples from the initial sampling of 134 participants, and the sample size meets the requirements of statistical testing methods involved in our study, including descriptive analysis, one-way repeated measures MANOVA, ANOVA, and the multiple regression analyses ( Pallant, 2016 ; Frey, 2018 ). Following some scholars (e.g., Barkaoui et al, 2013 ; Sun, 2020 , 2022a , b ), we run a descriptive analysis of the means of L2 learners’ use of the four metacognitive strategies across tasks. We then used the line chart generated in Excel via the value of the means to illustrate the variance in the Chinese EFL learners’ IDs in metacognitive strategy use across tasks.…”

“…As stated earlier (refer to “INTRODUCTION” section), the conceptualization of IDs in metacognitive strategy use during L2 speech production in our study was conducted through framing the concept in Kormos’ Model. In the research field of speaking, models generated in psycholinguistics are broadly acknowledged and employed (e.g., Kormos, 2006 , 2011 ; Skehan, 2016 ; Yahya, 2019 ; Sun, 2022a , b ), among which Levelt’s (1989) model of monolingual speech production has become “one of the most comprehensive and widely used theoretical frameworks” for monolingual speech production ( Sun, 2016 , p. 27). Based on this model, De Bot (1992) proposed his L2 speech production model, followed by many similar research efforts (e.g., Poulisse and Bongaerts, 1994 ; Towell et al, 1996 ).…”

Cognitive Factors Influencing Utterance Fluency in L2 Dialogues: Monadic and Non-monadic Perspectives

“…Also, a linear relationship might not exist between fluency and some factors such as proficiency. This paper focuses on cognitive factors, while affective and sociocultural factors could also affect fluency (Sun and Zhang, 2020 ; Sun, 2022 ). These factors warrant future research from monadic and non-monadic perspectives regarding utterance fluency in L2 dialogues.…”

The relationship between different types of co-speech gestures and L2 speech performance

“…L2 speech performance in terms of CAF has been found to interact with individual differences such as personality and anxiety (Oya et al, 2004 ), working memory (Mota, 2005 ), willingness to communicate (Nematizadeh and Wood, 2019 ), and sociocultural attitudes toward target language and culture (Sun, 2022 ), but few L2 speech studies have examined its association with co-speech gesturing, or specifically, the movements of the hand and arm during speech. Noteworthily, increasingly more researchers agree that speech and gesture are two different but closely related modalities to express thoughts (McNeill, 1992 ; Goldin-Meadow, 2003 ; Kendon, 2004 ), and their close associations have been empirically supported in terms of occurring time (Church et al, 2014 ), language development (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow, 2005 ; Vilà-Giménez et al, 2021 ), semantic content (Kita and Özyürek, 2003 ), pragmatic functions (Loehr, 2012 ), etc.…”