Abstrakt
The thesis analyses the accuracy and fluency of spoken advanced-learner English. It draws its data from a corpus comprising 50 15-minute interviews with English philology students and from a parallel native-speaker corpus of 49 interviews.
Accuracy is explored by error analysis. Salient features of advanced learner English are identified and reveal that 2 groups of error are found to be most frequent, namely the use of articles and tenses.
For fluency measurements a selection of variables has been chosen to describe speed fluency (speech rate) and breakdown fluency (the frequency of unfilled and filled pauses), and the results are compared with the parallel corpus. The analysed native speakers produce speech at a generally much higher rate than the majority of the learners.
No direct correlation is found between fluency and the frequency of errors. Moreover, the learners overuse filled and unfilled pauses and produce shorter speech runs.
The conclusion of the thesis offers numerous pedagogical and research implications.