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.
In this paper we present a possible multi-method approach towards the description of a potential correlation between errors and temporal variables of (dys-)fluency in spoken learner language. Using the German subcorpus of theLouvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage(LINDSEI) and the native control corpusLouvain Corpus of Native English Conversation(LOCNEC), we first analysed errors and temporal variables of fluency quantitatively. We detected lexical and grammatical categories which are especially error-prone as well as problematic aspects of fluency for all learners in the LINDSEI subcorpus, e.g. confusion in tense agreement across clauses or an overuse of unfilled pauses. In the ensuing qualitative analysis of five prototypical learners, no trend for a possible correlation of accuracy and fluency could be observed. Fifty native speakers’ ratings of these five learners revealed that the learner with an average performance across the investigated variables received the highest ratings for overall oral proficiency.
To overcome planning phases in spontaneous speech production, learners and native speakers use strategies such as (un)filled pauses, smallwords or discourse markers. Small scale studies in this vein have demonstrated that learners differ from native speakers in that they underuse smallwords and discourse markers, and rely on other fluency-enhancing strategies instead. In the present paper, we present a corpusbased study, which investigates fluency-enhancing strategies in four components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI; Gilquin et al. 2010), covering four learner English varieties, namely Spanish, German, Bulgarian and Japanese. We investigate 216 different fluencemes (i.e. fluencyenhancing features; Götz in Fluency in native and nonnative English speech, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2013) in 200 transcribed interviews with advanced learners of English. An online coding application, which was specially designed and programmed for this project, enables us to cover such a large amount of data. We report on the design, functionality and (dis-)advantages of the online application, the multilevel-coding system we implemented, and the methodological challenges we face in detail. We will also present the findings of one first pilot study where we exhibit considerable variation between and within learners of particular native languages concerning fluenceme frequencies, while distributional patterns of fluencemes are rather similar across varieties.
In this paper, we introduce the language-pedagogic potential of the Corpus of Product Information (CoPI). The corpus is XML-annotated and contains about 100,000 words of product descriptions of health products, cleaning supplies and products for beauty and personal care, divided into three textual moves: (1) overview, (2) directions and (3) warnings. First, we describe the data collection, corpus design and annotation scheme of the corpus, and then we present the findings of an analysis of CoPI's most frequent words, clusters and its type–token ratio. Finally, we show its potential for language-pedagogic purposes and suggest how the CoPI analyses can be used for paper- and computer-based DDL activities that foster corpus-based genre teaching in the advanced EFL classroom. We conclude this paper by summarising the outcomes of a first case study we conducted to test these activities with advanced learners of English.
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