Lennon (1990, 2000) mentioned the speaking fluency includes two senses.
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The broad sense of fluency referred to the common parlance, which meat that speakers were able to have a high command of a language. In the narrow sense, fluency was viewed as one of descriptors of oral proficiency when examining speakers’ language skills in the language assessment. Fluent speaker should have
“native-like rapidity”. The concept of fluency was still vague in this description. Even among teachers, the words describe fluency may be still confusing and covering different aspects of fluency in research (Riggenbach, 1991; Schmidt, 1992; Schmitt-Gevers, 1993; Freed, 1995). To differentiate the features of fluency, Fillmore (1979, 2000), identified four kinds of fluency and varied among native-speakers. The first feature is “disc-jockey fluency”, referring to the “ability to fill time with talk”. The second is the “ability to talk in coherent, reasoned and semantically dense sentences.”
Instead of focusing on the rate of speech, it emphasized the quality of a sentence. The third is the “ability to have appropriate things to say in a wide range of contexts”.
Considering to the topics or situation of interlocutors, speakers’ fluency might perform differently. The last is the “ability…to be creative and imaginative in language use. Speakers may pre-edit the language in a creative way. Fillmore took different aspects of fluency into considerations, including the speed, speaking context, and the individual differences. Another aspect of fluency was regarded as an
underlying process of production. Schmidt (1992) considered fluency as the
“automatic procedural skill”. The speaking activities are a “interpersonal and psycho-motor control.” (Bygate, 1998). A fluent speaker should not pay much effort or attention on speech production. Lennon (2000) further revised the definition of fluency in the later work. He claimed that fluency is “the rapid, sooth, accurate, lucid, and efficient translation of thought or communicative intention into language under the temporal constraints of on-line processing”. From a cognitive perspective,
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Segalowitz (2010) listed three types of fluency. The first type is cognitive fluency, referring to the underlying processing, which is similar to Lennon’s definition. The second type is the utterance fluency which means the temporal variables, such as speech rate, pauses, or mean length of runs. These are the quantifiable and observable features in the speech production. The third type is perceived fluency, which referred to listener’s impressions or perceptions of speakers’ utterance. It is crucial to
differentiate the different senses of fluency. When the researcher invite the raters to give the judgements on the candidate’s performance, they are measuring the aspect of perceived fluency. The perceived fluency could be strongly affected by the utterance.
Neither perceived fluency nor utterance fluency may represent the whole concept of fluency.
2.2.2 Measurement of Fluency
Both the definition of fluency and its measurement have drawn considerable research interest. In the research of fluency, Koponen and Riggenbach (2000) researcher suggested different perspectives to look into the fluency. One way to examine the speech is through the temporal variables that are identifiable and
quantifiable features. Möhle (1984) proposed that the temporal variables might be the indicators to assess leaners’ fluency, such as speech rate, frequency, locations or length of silences and hesitations, mean length of speech runs, distributions of filled pauses repetitions and self-corrections. The pattern or the distribution of variables might be different between the native and non-native speakers. Some researchers took the phonological aspects of fluency (Hieke, 1984; Wennestrom, 2000). Some studies explored that the influence of formulaic speech in developing fluency of L2 learners.
(Ejzenberg, 2000; Towell, 1996).
Numerous studies took different approaches to establish the components of
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fluency. Some research studied the disparities between fluent speakers and non-fluent speakers (Ejzenberg, 2000). Other studies examined compared the hearer-based judgement with the temporal variables (Riggenbach, 1991; Rekart & Dunkel, 1992).
In several variables, the speech rate and the mean of length were often adopted and considered to be a strong indicator of fluency (Ejzenberg, 2000; Lennon, 1990). Freed (1995) also reported that raters agreed that rate of speech was a salient indicator in judging fluency. The speech rate calculating the number syllables produced per minutes. The mean length of runs means the average number of syllables of in speech production between pauses (Freed, 1995).
In the research of pauses, the pauses might possess different functions in the sentences. Except for being regarded as a dysfluency marker, pauses might be a
“juncture pauses” or possess the rhetorical function (Chafe, 1980; Lounsbury, 1954).
There was the chance that the pauses results from the hesitations, which could be hardly tolerated by listeners (Butcher, 1980). According to Riggenbach (1991), the
“unfilled pauses” could be a great predictor of the nonfluency of L2 learners.
Lennon (1990) investigated a wide range of measures to identify the quantifiable variables that could be the most influential on the perceptions of listeners. The
number of participants was small in this exploratory study. Four L2 subjects received the German-English translation class for 23 weeks. They were shown a six-picture sequence and asked to retell the story in the pretest and posttest. He found that the three variables: pruned words per minute, filled pauses per Unit and percent of T-units followed by pause were significantly different across four subjects. One of subjects improved in different set of variables, which showed that the variations existed in the individual differences. We have note that the results came from the small sample groups, whether the remaining variables were necessary or not might
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need to be reexamined with larger group samples.
Compared to the elicited data in monologue in Lennon’s study, Riggenbach (1991) suggested that the study should add the naturalistic data, such as conversations.
This data allowed the researchers to observe the “conversational fluency” that contained some other features only appeared in dialogue, for example, the repair initiation. Both studies adopted dual approach by inviting raters to judge learners’
fluency and analyzed the temporal variables in speech production. The relations between the utterance fluency and perceived fluency was correlated. Ejzenberg (2000) reminded that researchers should take both “speaker-based” and “listener-based” sides to evaluate the fluency. However, to what degree of fluency or what kinds of exact descriptors of fluency would affect listeners’ perceptions remains unclear.
Though the fluency was the focus of this study, accuracy should be taken into account. As for the listeners’ perceptions, accuracy still affect fluency and judgement, and even sometimes has larger influence than other temporal variables (Kormos &
Dénes, 2004). In this study, we also contained accuracy into the study and see whether or not the accuracy was correlated to the judges’ scores in the judgement of fluency.
The present study would adopt three variables: rate of speech and frequency of pauses and accuracy. In the following section, the research questions would be proposed.