Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) predict adequacy; and whether proficiency and task type moderate these relationships. Twenty native speakers and 80 second language users from four proficiency levels performed five tasks. Speech samples were rated for adequacy and coded for a range of complexity, accuracy, and fluency indices. Filled pause frequency, a feature of breakdown fluency, emerged as the strongest predictor of adequacy. Predictors with significant but smaller effects included indices of all three CAF dimensions: linguistic complexity (lexical diversity, overall syntactic complexity, syntactic complexity by subordination, frequency of conjoined clauses), accuracy (general accuracy, accuracy of connectors), and fluency (silent pause frequency, speed fluency). For advanced speakers, incidence of false starts also emerged as predicting communicatively adequate speech. Task type did not influence the link between linguistic features and adequacy.

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Conceived within the TBLT framework, the present study examined pedagogic tasks as vehicles for demonstrating L2 learners' discourse appropriacy in oral production. Eighty ESL learners' discourse appropriacy was measured using three pragmatically-oriented task types (complaint, refusal, and advice) across four different proficiency levels. The findings showed that, for all task types, as general proficiency increased, ratings of discourse appropriacy also increased. We found that there was a pronounced difference in discourse appropriacy between the intermediate and advanced proficiency levels, and that for learners at higher levels of proficiency, discourse appropriacy did not vary from task to task. In contrast, task type made a difference for less proficient learners in that the refusal task was particularly challenging compared with other tasks.