We are very happy to welcome Judit Kormos and Shungo Suzuki who will speak about Investigating second language fluency among Japanese university students: Predictors of performance and task-related variability. We hope you can join us!
Investigating second language fluency among Japanese university students: Predictors of performance and task-related variability
Abstract:
In the context of the learning and teaching of second language (L2) speaking skills, oral fluency is commonly regarded as one of the major learning goals, due to its important role in real-world communication. A certain level of fluency is necessary to maintain the interlocuter’s attention in oral communication and to be able to save speakers’ own face (Lennon, 2000), and oral fluency is also a significant factor in the comprehensibility of L2 speech (Suzuki & Kormos, 2020). Fluency constitutes an important aspect of the assessment of speaking skills in a variety of high-stakes oral proficiency tests and is also a robust indicator of L2 proficiency (Tavakoli et al., 2020). Therefore, it is essential to better understand L2 oral fluency as a construct particularly in the Japanese higher education context where learners need to develop spoken language proficiency for use in future workplace contexts.
In this presentation, we report two studies forming part of a larger project that has investigated predictors and variability in L2 oral fluency among 128 Japanese university students. Speech data were elicited using four speaking tasks: argumentative task, picture narrative task, and reading-to-speaking, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task. We assessed utterance fluency (observable temporal features of speech) using measures of speed, breakdown and repair fluency. We measured cognitive fluency, which is defined as speaker's ability to manipulate L2 knowledge efficiently (see Segalowitz, 2010), by means of vocabulary size and grammaticality tests and lexical retrieval, sentence construction and articulatory speed. In the first study, we examined the relationship between the utterance and cognitive fluency, and in the second study we analysed variations in temporal features of fluency across tasks. Our findings yield insights into what L2 skills and knowledge areas learners need to develop to become fluent L2 speakers and how cognitive demands of different types of task can exert an impact on the fluency of students’ performance. The findings can assist in syllabus and curriculum design for university-level language teaching as well as inform the assessment of Japanese university students’ oral communication skills.
References:
Lennon, P. (2000). The lexical element in spoken second language fluency. In H. Riggenbach (Ed.), Perspectives on fluency (pp. 25–42). University of Michigan Press.
Segalowitz, N. (2010). Cognitive bases of second language fluency. Routledge.
Suzuki, S., & Kormos, J. (2020). Linguistic dimensions of comprehensibility and perceived fluency: An investigation of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in second language argumentative speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 42(1), 143–167. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263119000421
Tavakoli, P., Nakatsuhara, F., & Hunter, A.-M. (2020). Aspects of Fluency Across Assessed Levels of Speaking Proficiency. The Modern Language Journal, 104(1), 169–191. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12620
Bios:
Judit Kormos works as a Professor in Second Language Acquisition at Lancaster University. Her research interests include the psycholinguistic aspects of second language acquisition, reading comprehension and speech production. She is also the author of several research papers that have investigated the accessibility of language tests for young learners. She was a key partner in the award-winning Dyslexia for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language project sponsored by the European Commission and is a lead educator in the Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching
massive open online learning course offered by Future Learn. She is the author of the book Speech production and second language acquisition and The second language acquisition processes of students with specific learning difficulties. She has published a large number of research articles in international journals on the role of cognitive factors in second language learning and fluency in second language speech.
Shungo Suzuki is an Assistant Research Professor in the Perceptual Computing Laboratory at Waseda University, Japan, and currently is a Principal Investigator of the project, Development of Online Language Learning Assistant AI System that Grows with Humans, funded by New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
