Disfluency and Proficiency in Second Language Speech Production

Disfluency and Proficiency in Second Language Speech Production PDF Author: Simon Williams
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303112488X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This book explores the concept of disfluency in speech production, particularly as it occurs in the context of second language acquisition. Drawing on examples from learner speech at three levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced), the author argues that acquiring target language norms for performing disfluency is essential to an individual being recognized as fluent in a language by fellow-speakers. Starting with a survey of the psycholinguistic research in this area, he then applies a sociolinguistic lens to examine how a learner's social and educational background impacts the types of disfluencies in their speech. This book will be of interest to readers in fields such as (applied) linguistics and second language acquisition, psychology and education.

Disfluency and Proficiency in Second Language Speech Production

Disfluency and Proficiency in Second Language Speech Production PDF Author: Simon Williams
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303112488X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the concept of disfluency in speech production, particularly as it occurs in the context of second language acquisition. Drawing on examples from learner speech at three levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced), the author argues that acquiring target language norms for performing disfluency is essential to an individual being recognized as fluent in a language by fellow-speakers. Starting with a survey of the psycholinguistic research in this area, he then applies a sociolinguistic lens to examine how a learner's social and educational background impacts the types of disfluencies in their speech. This book will be of interest to readers in fields such as (applied) linguistics and second language acquisition, psychology and education.

Second Language Speech Fluency

Second Language Speech Fluency PDF Author: Parvaneh Tavakoli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108603432
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Second language (L2) fluency is an exciting and fast-moving field of research, with clear practical applications in language teaching. This book provides a lively overview of the current advances in the field of L2 fluency, and connects the theory to practice, presenting a hands-on approach to using fluency research across a range of different language-related professions. The authors introduce an innovative multidisciplinary perspective, which brings together research into cognitive and social factors, to understand fluency as a dynamic variable in language performance, connecting learner-internal factors such as speech processing and automaticity, to external factors such as task demands, language testing, and pragmatic interactional demands in communication. Bringing a much-needed multidisciplinary and novel approach to understanding the complex nature of L2 speech fluency, this book provides researchers, students and language professionals with both the theoretical insights and practical tools required to understand and research how fluency in a second language develops.

Handbook of Second Language Assessment

Handbook of Second Language Assessment PDF Author: Dina Tsagari
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500864
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Second language assessment is ubiquitous. It has found its way from education into questions about access to professions and migration. This volume focuses on the main debates and research advances in second language assessment in the last fifty years or so, showing the influence of linguistics, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and psychometrics. There are four parts which, when taken together, address the principles and practices of second language assessment while considering its impact on society. Read separately, each part addresses a different aspect of the field. Part I deals with the conceptual foundations of second language assessment with chapters on the purposes of assessment, and standards and frameworks, as well as matters of scoring, quality assurance, and test validation. Part II addresses the theory and practice of assessing different second language skills including aspects like intercultural competence and fluency. Part III examines the challenges and opportunities of second language assessment in a range of contexts. In addition to chapters on second language assessment on a national scale, there are chapters on learning-oriented assessment, as well as the uses of second language assessment in the workplace and for migration. Part IV examines a selection of important issues in the field that deserve attention. These include the alignment of language examinations to external frameworks, the increasing use of technology to both deliver and score second language tests, the responsibilities associated with assessing test takers with special needs, the concept of 'voice' in second language assessment, and assessment literacy for teachers and other test and score users.

Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency

Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency PDF Author: Norman Segalowitz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136968830
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Winner of the 2011 Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize Exploring fluency from multiple vantage points that together constitute a cognitive science perspective, this book examines research in second language acquisition and bilingualism that points to promising avenues for understanding and promoting second language fluency. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency covers essential topics such as units of analysis for measuring fluency, the relation of second language fluency to general cognitive fluidity, social and motivational contributors to fluency, and neural correlates of fluency. The author provides clear and accessible summaries of foundational empirical work on speech production, automaticity, lexical access, and other issues of relevance to second language acquisition theory. Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency is a valuable reference for scholars in SLA, cognitive psychology, and language teaching, and it can also serve as an ideal textbook for advanced courses in these fields.

Handbook of Second Language Assessment

Handbook of Second Language Assessment PDF Author: Dina Tsagari
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1614513821
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Second language assessment is ubiquitous. It has found its way from education into questions about access to professions and migration. This volume focuses on the main debates and research advances in second language assessment in the last fifty years or so, showing the influence of linguistics, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and psychometrics. There are four parts which, when taken together, address the principles and practices of second language assessment while considering its impact on society. Read separately, each part addresses a different aspect of the field. Part I deals with the conceptual foundations of second language assessment with chapters on the purposes of assessment, and standards and frameworks, as well as matters of scoring, quality assurance, and test validation. Part II addresses the theory and practice of assessing different second language skills including aspects like intercultural competence and fluency. Part III examines the challenges and opportunities of second language assessment in a range of contexts. In addition to chapters on second language assessment on a national scale, there are chapters on learning-oriented assessment, as well as the uses of second language assessment in the workplace and for migration. Part IV examines a selection of important issues in the field that deserve attention. These include the alignment of language examinations to external frameworks, the increasing use of technology to both deliver and score second language tests, the responsibilities associated with assessing test takers with special needs, the concept of 'voice' in second language assessment, and assessment literacy for teachers and other test and score users.

Fluency and Disfluency Across Languages and Language Varieties

Fluency and Disfluency Across Languages and Language Varieties PDF Author: Liesbeth Degand
Publisher: Presses universitaires de Louvain
ISBN: 2875587692
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Fluency and disfluency are characteristic of online language production and may be signalled by markers such as filled and unfilled pauses, discourse markers, repeats or self-repairs, which can be said to reflect ongoing mechanisms of processing and monitoring. The Fluency & Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties conference held at the University of Louvain in February 2017 marked the closing of a five-year research project dedicated to the multimodal and contrastive investigation of fluency and disfluency in (L1 and L2) English, French and French Belgian sign language, with a focus on variation according to language, speaker and genre. The closing conference was intended as an opportunity to further expand the range of languages, language varieties and genres studied from the (dis)fluency perspective. The selection of papers in this volume re ects the diversity of approaches aiming to uncover the ways in which fluency and disfluency are conceived in language production and comprehension and how they are signalled. Topics include methodological challenges in cross-linguistic (dis)fluency research, the role of contextual features in professional and non-professional settings, and the characteristics of fluency and disfluency in second language speech. Of particular importance in all contributions is the ambivalent role of pauses, discourse markers, repeats and other markers, which can be both a symptom of encoding difficulties and a sign that the speaker is trying to help the hearer decode the message. They should thus be interpreted in context to identify their contribution to fluency and/or disfluency, which can be viewed as two sides of the same coin.

Fluency in Native and Nonnative English Speech

Fluency in Native and Nonnative English Speech PDF Author: Sandra Götz
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902720358X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This book takes a new and holistic approach to fluency in English speech and differentiates between productive, perceptive, and nonverbal fluency. The in-depth corpus-based description of productive fluency points out major differences of how fluency is established in native and nonnative speech. It also reveals areas in which even highly advanced learners of English still deviate strongly from the native target norm and in which they have already approximated to it. Based on these findings, selected learners are subjected to native speakers' ratings of seven perceptive fluency variables in order to test which variables are most responsible for a perception of oral proficiency on the sides of the listeners. Finally, language-pedagogical implications derived from these findings for the improvement of fluency in learner language are presented. This book is conceptually and methodologically relevant for corpus-linguistics, learner corpus research and foreign language teaching and learning.

Beyond Disfluency

Beyond Disfluency PDF Author: Loulou Kosmala
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027247269
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book pioneers a tridimensional approach to (dis)fluency, evaluating fluency across three different dimensions, mainly speech, gesture, and interaction. Drawing from an extensive video dataset covering different languages and speech genres in French and English, the present research goes beyond traditional production-oriented models of so-called ‘disfluency’ phenomena, and aims to unravel the complexities of human multimodal production and interactive processes. Designed for linguists, communication scholars, and researchers, this work resonates with the latest trends in different fields (Second Language Acquisition, Interactional Linguistics, and Gesture studies). It introduces a fresh perspective on disfluency by integrating visual-gestural features, such as hand gestures, gaze, and facial expressions, captured in situated interaction.

The Native Speaker

The Native Speaker PDF Author: Alan Davies
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 9781853596223
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Linguists, applied linguists and language teachers all appeal to the native speaker as an important reference point. But what exactly (who exactly?) is the native speaker? This book examines the native speaker from different points of view, arguing that the native speaker is both myth and reality.

Advanced Proficiency and Exceptional Ability in Second Languages

Advanced Proficiency and Exceptional Ability in Second Languages PDF Author: Kenneth Hyltenstam
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501500481
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
While the literature on second language acquisition and use is overwhelmingly rich with respect to initial and intermediate stages of development, present knowledge of levels of ultimate attainment that are equal or close to that if native speakers has so far not been presented in a coherent manner. This is what the present volume aims to achieve. In addition to chapters that summarize what is currently known about the grammatical, lexical, and discourse features that continue to exhibit instability at the most advanced levels of second language development, the volume presents overviews of the incipient research on two unique learner populations, polyglots and employees in international call centres. Polyglots, defined as language users who are proficient in six or more second languages, may be considered second language learners par excellence. Call centre employees in economically less developed parts of the world are intriguing in how they cope with the high language proficiency requirements of their job. In conclusion, this book is relevant for all readers - both professionals and students - interested in the development of second language theory. For language teachers, the book provides insights that are profitable in classrooms for advanced learners.