To respond to recent calls for examining oral fluency from a broader social and communicative perspective, the current study aimed at investigating the effects of task communicative function on second language (L2) and first language (L1) speakers' fluency. Designing tasks that represent three different communicative functions (congratulations,…

The study examined how learners' motivational dispositions predict the complexity, accuracy, fluency of their oral task performance and their overall second language proficiency. Eighty-one speakers of English as a second language in the United States completed a regulatory focus and a regulatory mode questionnaire, an oral interview task, and a…

Second language (L2) utterance fluency is crucial for speaking proficiency assessment. The measurement of L2 utterance fluency relies heavily on silent pause identification. However, empirical studies establishing specific silent pause thresholds for L2 monologic speaking are scarce, and even fewer exist for L2 dialogic speaking. This study thus…

Background: Assessing spoken discourse during aphasia clinical examination is crucial for diagnostic and rehabilitation purposes. Recent approaches have been developed to quantify content word fluency (CWF) and informativeness of spoken discourse without the need to perform time-consuming transcription and coding. However, the accuracy of these…

The relationship between foreign language anxiety (FLA) and foreign language enjoyment (FLE) experienced during a creative collaborative oral English-as-a-foreign-language task, and the relationships between FLE/FLA and task speech fluency were investigated. The task was performed by mid-intermediate/high-intermediate English learners (N = 43) in…

This study investigates the speech rate of Cypriot Greek-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) as well as the effect of age and gender. The participants were 16 children with DLD ages 4 years 11 months to 8 years 1 month and 22 children with typical language development (TLD) ages 4 years 5 months to 8 years 7 months. Both…

Purpose: The dual-task paradigm has been frequently used to examine stroke-related deficits because it samples behavioral performance under conditions of distraction similar to functioning in real-life environments. This original systematic review synthesizes studies that examined dual-task effects involving spoken language production in adults…

Complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) as measures of language proficiency have been used extensively in assessing second language production in English language studies related to task-based language teaching. The present review adds the following critical elements to the existing body of literature: (i) Provides synthesis and critical analysis…

This longitudinal study examines the effects of a pre-study abroad (SA) pedagogic intervention and subsequent SA experience on second language (L2) Mandarin fluency. It explores two temporal aspects of oral fluency--planning time and speech rate--along with one performance measure, duration of response. Additionally, L2 contact data were included…

The main aim of this study was to investigate how oral fluency is assessed across different levels of proficiency in the Test of English for Educational Purposes (TEEP). Working with data from 56 test-takers performing a monologic task at a range of proficiency levels (equivalent to approximately levels 5.0, 5.5, 6.5, and 7.5 in the IELTS scoring…

Increased second language acquisition (SLA) research interest in the effect of planning on subsequent L2 oral production has typically examined the effect of planning on the syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and/or fluency (CALF) of L2 production. However, the results of research in this domain are inconclusive. This study, a…

This study adopted an action research design to analyze the contribution of the Elevator Pitch technique on English as foreign language learners' oral fluency. Six 11th graders in a rural at-risk context in a vocational public high school in Hualqui, Chile participated in this study. The Elevator Pitch technique was implemented during seven…

While task repetition is effective for improving oral fluency, some teachers are reluctant to use it in their classrooms due to the alleged negative perceptions of learners toward repetitive practice. To address this concern, the participants in the current study completed a posttask questionnaire probing their perceptions toward task repetition…

Purpose: Previous studies have shown that individuals who stutter exhibit abnormal speech perception in addition to disfluent production as compared with their nonstuttering peers. This study investigated whether adult Chinese-speaking stutterers are still able to use knowledge of statistical regularities embedded in their native language to…

This paper explores the development of an intelligent translation system for spoken English using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models. The fundamental principles of RNNs and their advantages in processing sequential data, particularly in handling time-dependent natural language data, are discussed. The methodology for constructing the…