Toward an understanding of fluency: A microanalysis of nonnative speaker conversations

Abstract

There have been few attempts to specify precisely what fluency is, although it is a term that is used and understood by both laypeople and linguists. With one objective being to achieve a greater understanding of what comprises fluency, this study explores the speech of six nonnative speakers of English who had been rated by English instructors as either “fluent” or “nonfluent.” Excerpts of audiotaped dialogues were analyzed, both at the utterance level and at the discourse level, in terms of the frequency and possible function of features that have often been ascribed to fluency (hesitation phenomena, repair, and rate of speech). More functionally oriented pragmatic features that relate to topic control and initiation were also examined.

Comparison of subgroups on the basis of perceived fluency or lack of fluency provided few statistically significant results, although the findings of qualitative analyses suggest that fluency is a complex, high‐order linguistic phenomenon and that intuitive judgments about fluency level—such as those made by the raters for this study—may take into account a wide range of linguistic phenomena. Thus, this study offers an innovative approach to understanding fluency, with possibly implications for the teaching and testing of languages, as well as for research on second language acquisition processes.