Abstract/Summary

To respond to recent calls for examining oral fluency from a broader social and communicative perspective (Segalowitz, 2010, 2016), this thesis aims at investigating the effects of task communicative function on L2 and L1 speakers’ fluency. Only few studies have previously looked into the relationship between pragmatics and oral fluency (e.g., Taguchi, 2007, Taguchi 2011). However, these studies have only looked into some aspects of fluency and only with L1 and L2 pairs. Therefore, this study aims at filling this gap by looking at fluency from different perspectives and setting baselines for L2 speakers’ L1 and L2 fluency behaviour. Data was collected from 40 Chilean L2 learners of English with an intermediate proficiency level, 20 L1 English speakers from the UK, and 20 L1 Spanish speakers from Chile. The 80 participants performed three tasks representing different communicative functions (Congratulation, Bad News and Complaint). The data were analysed for a range of measures of speed (articulation rate), composite (speech rate), breakdown (frequency of silent and filled pauses at mid and end-clause location) and repair (frequency of repairs) fluency. Results of the statistical analyses (descriptive, repeated-measures MANOVA and two-way-mixed ANOVAs) suggested that only L1 English speakers’ speech is significantly affected by task communicative functions, more specifically, in the frequency of end-clause pauses they produced. However, some patters were also discovered across languages. The task of Bad News elicited the slowest speech, both when measured by articulation rate and speech rate. The task of Congratulations, on the other hand, prompted the fastest articulation rate and frequency of repairs across languages. The three language groups’ fluency was also statistically different highlighting a) cross-linguistic differences between L1 Spanish and L1 English, and b) differences between L1 and L2 English speakers.