Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency

Norman Segalowitz

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136968839
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Linguistics

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.

1
Fluency, Second Language Acquisition, and Cognitive Science

For euen as a hauke flieth not hie with one wing;
euen so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tong.

(Roger Ascham, 1571/1967, p. 151)

This book is about second language fluency. Its goal is to locate the idea of fluency in a context that is much broader than what people usually think about when considering fluency in a language other than their native tongue. This book examines fluency from multiple vantage points that together constitute a cognitive science perspective. In doing so, it examines research in second language acquisition and bilingualism that point to promising avenues for understanding—and ultimately helping to promote—fluent second language skills. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the volume as a whole. It presents five anchor questions that the volume will address, and then summarizes the main take-home message about fluency.

Why Study Fluency?

Roger Ascham (1515–1568), cited above, was tutor to Queen Elizabeth I. He recognized that knowledge of languages beyond one’s mother tongue was important for gaining access to the intellectual and artistic wealth of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world. Ascham emphasized the need for high-level mastery of these languages and wrote at length on how to achieve it. Many of his suggestions would be regarded as outdated and inappropriate nowadays, but the need to be proficient in more than one language remains, if anything, greater today than it was in Ascham’s time, even if the reasons for it have changed. Today, for example, there is an unprecedented mobility of populations, a global scope in communications, and an ever-widening economic integration across the planet, all driving the need for bilingualism (and multilingualism). Indeed, it is believed that nowadays most people in the world do know more than one language (Tucker, 1997). Dewaele, Housen, and Wei (2003), for example, point out that there are in the order of 6,000 languages in the world but only about 200 countries, most with different national languages, and therefore most people likely have to function in more than one language. Often, people use one local language for their daily business, another regional or national language for economic and political participation at a wider level, and a world language (English, French, Chinese, etc.) for communicating on yet a larger plane. And therein lies an interesting challenge.

Although most people may have some knowledge of at least one second language (as is customary in the literature, any language beyond the first, including third, fourth, etc. languages, will also be referred to here as L2), they nevertheless are rarely able to use it with the same—or even close to the same—level of skill as their first language (L1). Not only is knowledge of the L2 weaker, but typically people are markedly less fluent using what L2 knowledge they do have. There is a fluency gap. This fluency gap is often a source of frustration and regret; most people would like to be more skilled in their weaker language(s). Unfortunately, most only ever achieve limited fluency, although there are, of course, many notable exceptions. Ultimately, if something is to be done about improving fluency, there will need to be a greater understanding of what underlies such fluency gaps, why the gaps are so difficult to overcome, and what conditions are best for reducing them.

These questions need to be addressed at two levels. First, we need to find out why within-individual fluency gaps exist. That is, if people are fluent in their L1, why is it often so difficult for them to become fluent in another language? After all, it would appear that they bring the same basic intelligence, emotional, and personality traits as well as the same basic cognitive and perceptual abilities to the learning situation, whether it be for the L1 or L2. Second, we need to understand why between-individual differences exist in the magnitude of such fluency gaps. Some people appear to be much more successful than others in using their L2, whereas the range of individual differences in the L1 is much narrower, nearly everyone seeming to have little difficulty becoming relatively fluent. How can we explain such within and between individual differences? Answering these questions surely will help in the long run in identifying practical steps to reduce unwanted fluency gaps. There is, however, a more basic, deceptively simple yet pressing question that must be addressed first—What do we actually mean by the term fluency?

On this point, the literature is at times confusing and disappointing. There are a multitude of meanings for fluency as the term is used in English. Anyone reading the scientific literature will quickly find that researchers provide many different ways of operationalizing what they mean by the term fluency, as will be seen shortly. Moreover, there is no generally accepted model or framework to allow one to think about fluency in a systematic way, although there are some proposals that provide promising elements for such a framework. It is the aim of this volume to offer a perspective on fluency and a framework for thinking about it that will, it is hoped, lead to new insights about why fluency in an L2 is often so difficult to achieve and why there exist such large individual differences in fluency achievement. Accomplishing this will require bringing together several literatures. By doing so, it will be possible to define and operationalize fluency for research purposes, to bring a cognitive science perspective to bear on fluency, and to elaborate a framework for conducting research on it. In the sections that follow, these three goals are discussed briefly. This is followed by a presentation of five anchor questions that will shape the rest of the volume.

What is L2 Fluency?

Answering the question What is L2 fluency? will involve examining qualitative definitions of fluency that correspond to intuitive and subjective perceptions of a speaker’s L2 performance. It will also involve looking at how researchers and language performance evaluators have more precisely operationally and quantitatively defined fluency. In the discussion that follows, L2 speakers are assumed to exhibit normal fluency in their L1, and that any L2 dysfluencies relative to L1 fluency reflect the normal challenges of using an L2, not neurophysiological challenges of a clinical nature (see chapters in Ardila & Ramos, 2007, for discussion of clinical dysfluencies in bilinguals).

Qualitative Issues in Defining Fluency

To begin with, consider the following basic question: What does it mean, in ordinary language, to say that someone is fluent in an L2? This question is more complex than might appear at first glance. Kaponen and Riggenbach (2000) discuss some of the historical origins of the word fluency in English and its equivalents in other languages. For example, they report (p. 6) that for the English word fluently, Germans tend to use fliessent and flüssig (runningly and flowingly, respectively), Russians use beglo (runningly), and Finnish speakers use sujuvasti (in a flowing or liquid manner). As a noun, French uses aisance (ease), and Swedish uses flyt (flow). Kaponen and Riggenbach point out that in these and other languages, including English, there is a conceptual metaphor underlying the meaning of fluency, namely that “language is motion” (p. 7). As will become evident in the rest of this volume, this metaphor also underlies much of the scientific research on fluency. Additional discussions of the meanings of the word fluency can also be found in Chambers (1997), Hieke (1985), Kormos and Dénes (2004), R. Schmidt (1992), and Wood (2001), and in the edited volume by Riggenbach (2000).

This focus on the movement-like or fluidity aspects of speech seems to correspond to how most laypeople use the term fluency. Of course, in everyday speech, and in some research studies too, people sometimes intend something entirely different by the term fluency. For example, fluency is sometimes used to refer to the ability to express any idea in the L2 that one can also express in the L1, or to the ability to speak with little or no accent in the L2, or to be able to use a large vocabulary, or to speak with few grammatical errors. Indeed, at times one even hears fluency used with respect to the ability to read novels, to give extemporaneous speeches, to appreciate poetry or other difficult material in the target language, to use the language to counsel someone on a sensitive topic or to provide accurate translations to and from the language. In short, there are a very large number of behaviors that people might have in mind when thinking about fluency. Clearly, the natural language term fluency is not well defined. Indeed, the various behaviors associated with fluency may actually belong to different categories that, for research purposes, will need to be carefully distinguished from each other.

As mentioned above, a theme underlying the meaning of the word fluency is the conceptual metaphor language is motion. This metaphor focuses on those aspects of speech having to do with its fluidity or flowing quality. There is evidence that people do think about fluency in this way. For example, Freed (2000) asked six native speakers of French, three of whom were French teachers, to evaluate the fluency of student learners of French, to explain the basis for their observations, and to rank the importance of potential features of fluency listed for them by the researcher. More than half of the judges selected “rate of speech,” “smoother speech with fewer false starts,” “fewer pauses/hesitancies,” and “better grammar and vocabulary” (p. 254) as critical to their idea of fluency. As can be seen, three of the four refer to the fluidity of the speech. Freed also found, of course, that individual judges sometimes departed from using fluidity as the basis for their fluency judgments, but overall she did find that fluidity was the predominant underlying idea.

Fillmore (1979), in a classic paper on the topic, identified four kinds of fluency that people may be thinking about when making judgments about fluency. One is the ability to talk at length with a minimum of pauses. The second is the ability to package the message easily into “semantically dense” sentences without recourse to lots of filler material (for example, “you know,” “the thing is that,” etc.). The third is the ability to speak appropriately in different kinds of social contexts and situations, meeting the special communicative demands each may have. The fourth is the ability to use the language creatively and imaginatively by expressing ideas in new ways, to use humor, to make puns, to use metaphors, and so on. Although each of these four types of fluency may seem to belong to a different category, one can argue that they also reflect the feature of fluidity or flow. All of them lose their force as examples of fluent language use if not delivered with appropriate timing within the ever-evolving communicative situation; in this sense all four, as examples of kinds of fluency, are based on a temporal flow in the use of language.

Quantitative Issues in Defining Fluency

Researchers have had to find practical ways to define fluency so that it can be precisely measured. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, researchers have proposed many quantitative measures for fluency. These include speech features such as speech rate, hesitation and pause phenomena, density of clause usage, and combinations of these, among others. While many of these seem like obvious candidate features to use for measuring fluency, there can be problems. For example, regarding pauses and hesitations, Luoma (2004) makes an important observation about a problem often encountered in the search for quantitative measures of fluency. It is natural to want to think about fluency as being characterized by an absence of undue hesitations or excessive pauses, etc. However, whereas hesitations and pauses are amenable to quantitative, physical measurements of the speaker’s speech, the notions of “undue” and “excessive” are more qualitative and subjective, and they tell us more perhaps about the listener than about the speaker (Luoma, 2004, p. 88).

Kormos (2006), in her review, provided a table summarizing 10 measures of fluency that have been proposed in the literature (see Table 1.1; see also R. Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005, especially Chapter 7). Examination of Kormos’ list reveals that fluidity is the predominant feature of fluency in the minds of researchers, but even here we see that there are many different ways of conceptualizing what that means exactly. Fluidity, it would seem, is itself a multidimensional construct and so pinning down precisely what fluency means is clearly going to be a challenge! One goal of this volume is to suggest that, in order to meet this challenge, it might be useful to think about fluency in a way that grounds it in a larger context extending beyond the audible aspects language.

So far, we have been looking at fluency in a relatively atheoretical manner, focusing on intuitive and practical approaches to its definition. If work on fluency is to become the object of focused scientific inquiry, then fluency phenomena need to be seen through a lens that links them to the wider context of scientific inquiry into the nature of language. This brings us to the cognitive science perspective.

A Cognitive Science Approach to Fluency

As the title of this book suggests, the focus here is the cognitive bases of fluency, in keeping with the cognitive science perspective of the series in which this volume appears. It is natural to ask then, what would be a cognitive science perspective on fluency? How would such a perspective differ from other perspectives, and what is the particular advantage of a cognitive science approach? We turn briefly to these questions now.

Stainton (2006, p. xiii), writing in a volume that addressed major issues in contemporary cognitive science, defines cognitive science as

Table 1.1 Overview of Measures of Fluency, Based on Kormos (2006, p. 163, Table 8.2)

“the interdisciplinary attempt to understand the mind” involving four branches or groups of disciplines: (a) behavioral and brain sciences— including psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology; (b) social sciences—including anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics; (c) formal disciplines—including logic, computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence; and finally (d) philosophy of mind. For Stainton, the “hallmark of cognitive science, in brief, is that it draws on the methods and results of all these branches” (2006, p. xiii). A cognitive science perspective on L2 fluency, then, would be one that looks at fluency from the vantage point of all the disciplines mentioned above.

A skeptical reader may well ask how such a multidisciplinary approach could yield a coherent account of L2 fluency, one that would be more than an unrelated hodgepodge of different points of view. The long answer to this question might go something like this.

Fluency in a second language is an observable characteristic of re...