Investigating fluency variables in the speech of learners of two proficiency levels

Abstract

The presentation reports on the results of contrastive interlanguage analysis of Czech and Taiwanese advanced learners of English. Specifically, it analyses two essential components of language fluency, namely speech rate and the use of pauses.

Compared to native speakers, the learners achieve a lower speech rate whilst producing more pauses even at the cost of inserting these within constituents.

Keywords

• fluency
• speech rate
• pausology
• learner corpora
• learner language
• corpus linguistics