Abstract: Broadening the context for analysing fluency - time and task effects on Mandarin in fluency development during Study Abroad

Clare Wright, University of Leeds

This presentation takes forward our current understanding of how L2 fluency can vary, according to task or context or over time, by considering fluency development through immersion during Study Abroad (SA). SA is generally found to benefit fluency, though learners tend to gain in different ways in different tasks, and to use a variety of strategies to improve their speaking abilities. The talk focuses on learners of Mandarin, which has so far been much less studied for SA benefits than other western languages (e.g. English, French, Spanish, German), and brings its own methodological challenges for transcription and analysis.

I will illustrate these challenges with data comparing changes in speaking performance among adult ab initio learners of L2 Mandarin from UK universities pre/post nine months’ Study Abroad in mainland China. Data comes from four monologic and dialogic tasks, involving prepared and spontaneous speech, assessing change in speed, breakdown and complexity of output. Across tasks, measures generally improved over time; in particular mean number of characters per utterance, articulation rate, use of filled pauses improved significantly (p <.01). However, other measures such as repairs, mean length of silent pauses, location of silent pauses, length of utterance and lexical diversity, differed between tasks, and were very variable across the group, highlighting individual differences in processing prepared vs. unprepared speech demands.

The talk will finish with an exploration of how scientific analyses of speech fluency connects with wider research looking at learners’ strategies in developing interactional competence, to contextualise the social application of fluency research, both to instructed and immersion language learning settings

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