Abstract
Utterance fluency is widely acknowledged to be three-dimensional (i.e., speed, breakdown and repair), but little direct evidence has been offered in support of its dimensionality. This study examines the factor structures of speed and breakdown fluency and their relationships with EFL proficiency by evaluating 162 EFL learners’ retelling performances with respect to commonly used speed measures as well as pause length and frequency measures. Findings from structural equation modeling show that speed fluency was represented by articulation rate and mean length of utterance, and breakdown fluency by mid-clause pause length and frequency as well as end-of-clause pause length. Although speed and breakdown fluency were strongly related, EFL proficiency had a direct effect on speed fluency but not on breakdown fluency. When articulation rate was replaced with speech rate as the sole measure of speed fluency, the factor structure of breakdown fluency was changed and EFL proficiency contributed a little more to speed fluency. These findings help to better understand how EFL learners make pauses and how measures of speed and breakdown fluency differ from but simultaneously relate to each other.
Funding source: The Humanities and Social Science Foundation of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China
Award Identifier / Grant number: Grant No. 19YJA740001
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Supplementary Material
This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2022-0125).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Exploring ESOL teachers’ perspectives on the language learning experiences, challenges, and motivations of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK
- Thai tonal confusion patterns in the production of L1 Chinese Zhuang students
- Lexical measures as a proxy for bilingual language dominance?
- Elicited metaphoric competence in a second language: a construct associated with vocabulary knowledge and general proficiency?
- Model texts in collaborative and individual writing among EFL children: noticing, incorporations, and draft quality
- Investigating Indonesian EFL learners’ knowledge and use of English causative constructions
- The relationship between university EFL teachers’ oral feedback beliefs and practices and the impact of individual differences
- “We thought about it together and the solution came to our minds”: languaging linguistic problem-solving in multilingual Finnish classrooms
- Lexical stress assignment preferences in L2 German
- Focus on form in task repetition through oral and written task modeling
- Prior processing, foreign language classroom anxiety, and L2 fluency
- Analyzing trends in the aural decoding errors of Japanese EFL learners
- Effects of task complexity on the learning of genre specific rhetorical moves and linguistic forms: the case of contrast and argumentative essays
- Glossing and incidental vocabulary learning in L2 reading: a cognitive load perspective
- Factor structures of speed and breakdown fluency in EFL learners’ story retelling performances
- The acquisition of L3 French present simple and present progressive by adult L1 Chinese speakers of L2 English