Webinar: What does it mean to be fluent in a language? Contextualizing fluency and disfluency... скачать в хорошем качестве

Webinar: What does it mean to be fluent in a language? Contextualizing fluency and disfluency...

For the 10th installment of our Innovations in Language Assessment webinar series, we welcome Xun Yan, Professor of Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education, and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Fluency has long been a central construct in language testing and assessment, often associated with ease of speech production and oral language proficiency. However, fluency is not simply the absence of disfluency. Rather, disfluency is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural speech and can provide valuable insights into the cognitive processes and sociocultural considerations in oral interactions. In this talk, I first synthesize research findings on the fluency-proficiency relationships. Then, through a series of studies on both large-scale and local language tests, I demonstrate how disfluency features can add explanatory value to language proficiency, how fluency is often marked by the co-occurrence of multiple temporal features, and how different co-occurrence patterns might indicate different challenges and strategies speakers experience to maintain the flow of speech and conversation. Arguably, these nuances bring closer the operationalization and perception of speech fluency; however, they also reveal greater complexities in the fluency-proficiency relationships, raising interesting questions about the validity and fairness of test scores that are, at least, partially based on fluency. I argue that the understanding of what fluency means is far from being conclusive and hope that this talk will broaden the conceptualization of fluency and facilitate continued discussions of its assessment implications.