The Relationships between Second Language Speakers’ Oral Productions, Oral Proficiency, and their Individual Differences: A Longitudinal Study

Despite the importance of English speaking skills in higher education contexts (Andrade 2009), there has been a lack of investigations into longitudinal development in English as second language (ESL) speakers’ oral proficiency in relation to their oral production features (complexity, accuracy, fluency: CAF) and individual differences in working memory (WM) and aptitude. Existing research examining the relationships between CAF measures and L2 oral proficiency mostly focused on monologic tasks although CAF measures might significantly vary between monologic and dialogic task types (Michel et al., 2012). The purpose of this dissertation is threefold. First, the study investigates whether CAF measures of ESL speakers’ monologic and dialogic oral performances predict development in their oral proficiency over time. Second, the dissertation examines whether ESL speakers’ WM and aptitude are predictive of their oral proficiency development. Third, the dissertation also examines whether the relationships between CAF measures and oral proficiency are mediated by the speakers’ WM and aptitude. In total, 60 ESL participants (matriculated and non-matriculated) performed both monologic and dialogic oral tasks at three different times over eight months. The participants’ oral proficiency was measured by TOEFL iBT speaking tests and communicative adequacy ratings of their monologic and dialogic speech. The results show that in monologic speech, high proficient ESL speakers produced more syntactically and lexically complex language, whereas in dialogic speech, they produced faster speech. The findings also indicate that although in both monologic and dialogic speech, the participants with lower phonation (compared to pauses) significantly developed their oral proficiency over time, in dialogic speech, the participants with longer turns (in-between pauses) had longitudinal development in oral proficiency. The dissertation also found that high proficient ESL speakers with higher aptitude used more familiar vocabulary in their monologic speech but shorter fluent runs and shorter clauses in dialogic speech. Overall, the study argues that high proficient speech in monologic versus dialogic modes have different linguistic benchmarks. The findings also offer insights into the processes of high proficient L2 speech production in monologic and dialogic tasks by suggesting the combined effects of ESL speakers’ aptitude and CAF features on their oral proficiency scores

The impact of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) on comprehensibility and perceived fluency in the case of L2-Greek: a partial replication study

Màster de Lingüística Aplicada i Adquisició de Llengües en Contextos Multilingües, Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2019-2020, Tutors: Roger Gilabert Guerrero & Maria AndriaThe present Master thesis aimed to partially replicate the article by Suzuki and Kormos (2019) on the linguistic dimensions of comprehensibility and perceived fluency. The distinguishability among the two constructs as well as their associations to complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) were investigated in the case of L2-Greek picture/descriptive speech. Speech stimuli from 68 Spanish/Catalan L2-Greek learners was presented to 8 naïve native judges to be evaluated with regards to comprehensibility and perceived fluency in a 9-point scale and was objectively analysed in terms of CAF measurements. Correlation analysis showed that most of the CAF variables are more or less correlated with both comprehensibility and perceived fluency and confirmed a strong association among the two constructs. However, judges were stricter when judging fluency than when judging comprehensibility. Furthermore, a series of multiple regression analyses revealed that within-clause pause ratio, grammatical accuracy and lexical complexity are the strongest predictors of comprehensibility, while grammatical accuracy, within-clause pause ratio, lexical complexity and lexical error rate best predict perceived fluency

The effects of complexity, accuracy, and fluency on communicative adequacy in oral task performance

Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) predict adequacy, and whether proficiency and task type moderate these relationships. In all, 20 native speakers and 80 second language users from four proficiency levels performed five tasks. Speech samples were rated for adequacy and coded for a range of CAF indices. Filled pause frequency, a feature of breakdown fluency, emerged as the strongest predictor of adequacy. Predictors with significant but smaller effects included indices of all three CAF dimensions: linguistic complexity (lexical diversity, overall syntactic complexity, syntactic complexity by subordination, and frequency of conjoined clauses), accuracy (general accuracy and accuracy of connectors), and fluency (silent pause frequency and speed fluency). For advanced speakers, incidence of false starts also emerged as predicting communicatively adequate speech. Task type did not influence the link between linguistic features and adequacy

Disentangling accent from comprehensibility

The goal of this study was to determine which linguistic aspects of second language speech are related to accent and which to comprehensibility. To address this goal, 19 different speech measures in the oral productions of 40 native French speakers of English were examined in relation to accent and comprehensibility, as rated by 60 novice raters and three experienced teachers. Results showed that both constructs were associated with many speech measures, but that accent was uniquely related to aspects of phonology, including rhythm and segmental and syllable structure accuracy, while comprehensibility was chiefly linked to grammatical accuracy and lexical richness

Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency as Properties of Language Performance: The Development of Multiple Subsystems over Time and in Relation to Each Other

Applied linguists have identified three components of second language (L2) performance: complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) to measure L2 development. Many studies researching CAF found trade-off effects (in which a higher performance in one component corresponds to lower performance in another) during tasks, often in online oral language performance. Trade-off effects are attributed to the inability of the learner to simuletaneously attend to all components at the highest level possible. Although cross-sectional research has suggested that students at different proficiency levels sacrifice performance in one CAF area while improving in another, there has been little longitudinal research about CAF (Ortega & Iberri-Shea, 2005). As such, previous research could not address if CAF grows linearly over time nor if the rate of CAF growth is the same for all learners. The current study explicitly addresses how language performance in CAF changes over L2 development in an instructed environment. This longitudinal study analyzed English L2 oral data from sixty-six students from Arabic, Chinese, and Korean language backgrounds over 3-9 months in the English Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. Elicited speeches were transcribed, coded, and assessed with three measures of structural complexity, a measure of lexical variety, two measures of accuracy, and three measures of fluency. The scores were then analyzed with hierarchical linear modeling (Singer & Willett, 2003) to investigate how each student’s performance changed over time for each measure and to determine predictive variables. Although individual differences were found in initial scores (often proficiency differences, but not for all measures), growth trajectories were the same for all measures, except one grammatical complexity measure (length of AS unit) where slopes differed by gender. All measures showed growth, and only two measures (lexical variety and a mean length of fluent run) showed non-linear growth. Trade-off effects found in cross-sectional studies were not found in these longitudinal data even though within-individual and between-individual correlations were also calculated. Additionally, the results may suggest that instructed language performance growth is uniform, rather than along individual paths. The research also serves to evaluate the measures, which has research and pedagogical implications

Pre-task planning time and working memory as predictors of accuracy, fluency, and complexity

Working memory, which accounts for the ability to process information in the face of interference, is critical to second language acquisition (SLA) and use. The interaction of working memory capacity (WMC) with specific pedagogical interventions is a logical place for empirical SLA research, both to examine the cognitive processes underpinning second language performance and to identify instructional treatments that may differentiate learners based on their WMC. A good candidate for such an examination is planning time, a pedagogical intervention that has been the subject of extensive empirical research, which has, thus far, been largely unrelated to WMC. The study undertaken here considers WMC along with two different types of pre-task planning time (guided and unguided) as predictors of the accuracy, fluency, and complexity of learners' discourse. Ninety-two intermediate ESL students from seven classes at a community college participated in this study by completing two different working memory span tasks as well as two different "there-and-then" oral story-telling tasks. The treatment condition of the story-telling tasks was manipulated so that learners' performance could be considered in terms of provision of pre-task planning (± planning), type of planning (guided vs. unguided), and order of planning (planning first or planning second). The results demonstrate that the relationship among type of planning time, order of planning time, and WMC is complex. Task order had a clear effect on learners' production, regardless of the provision of planning time. When learners began the series of story-telling tasks under the + planning condition, their output on the subsequent, unplanned task varied according to whether they had first received guided or unguided planning time. In addition, guided planning time and unguided planning time also have very different effects on learners' production, with guided planning time promoting a focus on accuracy at the expense of complexity and unguided planning time fostering fluency. Finally, this study indicates that task conditions can affect learners with high and low WMC in different ways. Learners with high WMC are more likely to comply with complex story-telling instructions, improving their focus on grammatical form at the expense of fluency, whereas learners with low WMC are more likely to improve their fluency as a result of task repetition, regardless of the task conditions

Psychological and sociodemographic correlates of communicative anxiety in L2 and L3 production

This paper analyses foreign language anxiety in the French L2 and English L3 speech production of 100 Flemish students. The findings suggest that foreign language anxiety is not a stable personality trait among experienced language learners. The societal as well as the individual contexts were found to determine levels of communicative anxiety. The perception of French as the former prestige language in Flanders and its function as a social marker was found to be linked to the participants' social class, which was, in turn, linked to levels of anxiety in French - but not in English. This social effect appeared to be a stronger predictor of communicative anxiety in French than three personality variables (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). Psychoticism, extraversion, and, to a lesser extent, neuroticism did however significantly predict levels of communicative anxiety in English L3 production. Students who scored high on the extraversion and psychoticism scales reported significant lower levels of communicative anxiety in English. Those who scored low on the neuroticism scale also tended to report lower levels of communicative anxiety in English. The same pattern emerged for communicative anxiety in French without reaching statistical significance

Intermediate and Advanced ESL Speakers’ Pause and Repair Use in the Finnish National Certificate of Language Proficiency Speaking Test: A mixed methods study

This thesis examined intermediate and advanced ESL speakers’ pause and repair use in the Finnish National Certificates of Language Proficiency speaking test, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods in an attempt to answer the following research questions: “Which quantitative measures of fluency distinguish between intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency?”; “how do pause and repair use distinguish between intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency?”; and “are pause and repair use interdependent?” 30 intermediate and 30 advanced Finnish L2 speakers taking a proficiency test in English were sampled from the Finnish National Certificates of Language Proficiency corpus (YKI corpus) and controlled for age, gender, and level of education. Their speech samples were transcribed, annotated, and analysed statistically. The quantitative results attained by analysing extreme cases showed that the temporal fluency measures of articulation rate, mean length of run, pause duration, frequency, and location as well as repair location distinguished between the intermediate and advanced levels of YKI, and that the largest difference between the two groups was in the mean lengths of run, which was used for extreme case sampling. These extreme samples from 12 participants were then analysed quantitatively for pause and repair use based on Nakatsuhara, Tavakoli & Awwad’s typology (2019): pauses and repairs were divided into pauses and repairs related to access and retrieval difficulty, reformulations, and effective speech delivery. Qualitative results showed that while intermediate participants had slightly more pauses and repairs related to access and retrieval difficulty than advanced participants, advanced participants were successful in their lexical and structural search more often than intermediate participants. In contrast, intermediate participants had more pauses related to reformulations than advanced. As for repairs, both intermediate and advanced participants had comparable numbers of reformulation repairs, but reformulation repairs were more common in the speech of intermediate and advanced participants with low mean lengths of run. In addition, the results showed that advanced participants used more of their pause and repair opportunities for more effective delivery. Advanced participants also used pauses and repairs to navigate socially and culturally difficult topics. Finally, the results showed that pause and repair use are interconnected: pause and repair use co-occurred and were used to achieve similar effects. The results suggest that pause and repair use, based on which inferences of L2 speakers’ cognitive fluency can be made, should not be overlooked in fluency studies or proficiency testing. It is suggested that pause and repair use should be studied further and included into definitions and operationalisations of L2 fluency

Global and localized network characteristics of the resting brain predict and adapt to foreign language learning in older adults

Resting brain (rs) activity has been shown to be a reliable predictor of the level of foreign language (L2) proficiency younger adults can achieve in a given time-period. Since rs properties change over the lifespan, we investigated whether L2 attainment in older adults (aged 64–74 years) is also predicted by individual differences in rs activity, and to what extent rs activity itself changes as a function of L2 proficiency. To assess how neuronal assemblies communicate at specific frequencies to facilitate L2 development, we examined localized and global measures (Minimum Spanning Trees) of connectivity. Results showed that central organization within the beta band (~ 13–29.5 Hz) predicted measures of L2 complexity, fluency and accuracy, with the latter additionally predicted by a left-lateralized centro-parietal beta network. In contrast, reduced connectivity in a right-lateralized alpha (~ 7.5–12.5 Hz) network predicted development of L2 complexity. As accuracy improved, so did central organization in beta, whereas fluency improvements were reflected in localized changes within an interhemispheric beta network. Our findings highlight the importance of global and localized network efficiency and the role of beta oscillations for L2 learning and suggest plasticity even in the ageing brain. We interpret the findings against the background of networks identified in socio-cognitive processes

What Does Linguistic Distance Predict When It Comes to L2 Writing of Adult Immigrant Learners of Spanish?

This study examined whether the linguistic distance between the first (L1) and second (L2) language is a significant determinant of L2 writing skills of 292 adult immigrants from 39 different source countries, who were beginner learners of Spanish L2. Gender, age, length of residence in Spain, education level as a proxy for literacy skills in L1, enrolment in Spanish language courses, and overall communicative competence in Spanish were also considered. Using both standard procedures for assessing L2 writing and performance-based psycholinguistic measures of accuracy and text-production fluency, the findings highlight the important role of linguistic proximity in achieving greater accuracy, text-production fluency, and overall L2 writing scores. Other significant predictors were age, enrolment in Spanish courses, and education level for accuracy; and length of residence in Spain and education level for text-production fluency. Although length of residence in Spain was negatively associated with text-production fluency in L2 writing, mediation analyses revealed that the effect of age on text-production fluency was mediated by length of residence in Spain and that L2 proficiency level mediated the link between linguistic distance and text-production fluency. Furthermore, most of the errors that these immigrants made were morphosyntactic and spelling errors, while vocabulary errors were rare