Applied Linguistics

In the context of 90 adult Japanese learners of English with diverse L2 experience and 10 native speakers, this study examined the linguistic characteristics and learner profiles of low, mid and high-level fluency performance. The participants' spontaneous speech samples were first rated by 10 native listeners for global fluency on a 9-point scale (1 =dysfluent, 9 = very fluent), and then divided into four proficiency groups via cluster analyses: low (n = 29), mid (n = 30), high (n = 31) and native (n = 10). Next, the dataset was analyzed for the number of pauses in mid/final clauses, articulation rate and the frequency of repetitions/self-corrections. According to the results of a series of ANOVAs, the number of final-clause pauses differentiated low and mid-level fluency performance; the number of mid-clause pauses differentiated mid and high-level performance; and articulation rate differentiated high and nativelike performance. The analyses also found that the participants' L2 fluency was significantly associated with their length of residence profiles (0-18 years), but not with their age of arrival profiles (19-40 years).

Despite the status of English as the Lingua Franca of the world (Seidlhofer, 2011) and the growing number of L2 users (Pennycook, 2017), researchers have mostly investigated L2-accented English based on native speakers' perceptions. In particular, a number of previous studies have looked at native English speakers' perceptions of fluency (e.g., Bosker, Pinget, Quené, Sanders, & de Jong, 2013). Only a limited number of studies have examined L2 speakers' perceptions of the same phenomenon (for a rare exception, see Rossiter, 2009). Therefore, we know very little about how L2 users conceptualize fluency, and what their subjective conceptualizations of fluency are. Thus, the current study took the first step to investigate the factors affecting L2 users' intuitive perceptions of L2 fluency using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Background Disentangling Fluency The importance of fluency has been recognized in successful L2 communication and language assessment contexts. Thus, previous studies have investigated which utterance features can predict fluency judgements by native speakers of target languages. Prior research has commonly reported that NSs' perception is associated largely with speed and breakdown fluency and secondarily with repair fluency (e.g., Bosker et al., 2013). However, prior research has exclusively employed native speakers as fluency judges while a number of studies have reported that L2 English communication takes place more frequently between L2 users than between L1 and L2 users. For the sake of the ecological validity of research findings, fluency research should be extended by examining L2 users' fluency judgements (Rossiter, 2009). Qualitative Approach to L2 learners Despite being limited in number, qualitative methods have uncovered affective and perceptual aspects of L2 learners. For example, Derwing, Munro and Thomson (2008) conducted individual interviews with 32 L2 English speakers in Canada (L1 Chinese and Russian/Ukrainian). Their results show that affective-cognitive, social, and motivational aspects play a role in L2 speakers' self-reported willingness to communicate in English, suggesting the importance of various aspects of L2 speech production. Regarding L2 learners' perception of fluency (the focus of this study), Rossiter's (2009) qualitative findings point towards temporal features of speech such as pausing and self-repetitions rather than their social perceptions. The raters in Rossiter (2009) also negatively reacted to non-temporal features of speech during their fluency judgements including pronunciation, vocabulary, and perceived confidence. Notably, both novice and expert raters gave a lot of negative comments on lexical errors perhaps due to their strong awareness of lexical choices and appropriateness than that of L2 speakers. Similarly, Tavakoli and Hunter (2018) explored teachers' understanding of fluency using a mixed-methods approach. The results demonstrated that teachers define fluency as an overall speaking ability; teachers conflated the distinction between fluency and speaking ability. Hence, their qualitative data showed that classroom teachers may address fluency in an incompatible way with findings from fluency research which commonly specifies fluency as temporal performance of speech. Our precursor research (Saito, Ilkan, Magne, Tran, & Suzuki, 2018) quantitatively explored a set of utterance fluency measures that differentiated between low, mid, and high levels of fluency judged by native speakers of British English in the context of picture narrative speech produced by 90 Japanese learners of English and 10 native speakers of Canadian English. The results showed that articulation rate differentiated high and nativelike

Following the trends established in psychology and emerging in L2 research, we explain our support for an Open Science approach in this paper (i.e., developing, analyzing and sharing datasets) as a way to answer controversial and complex questions in applied linguistics. We illustrate this with a focus on a frequently debated question, what underlies individual differences in the dynamic system of post-pubertal L2 speech learning? We provide a detailed description of our dataset which consists of spontaneous speech samples, elicited from 110 late L2 speakers in the UK with diverse linguistic, experiential and sociopsychological backgrounds, rated by ten L1 English listeners for comprehensibility and nativelikeness. We explain how we examined the source of individual differences by linking different levels of L2 speech performance to a range of learner-extrinsic and intrinsic variables related to first language backgrounds, age, experience, motivation, awareness, and attitudes using a series of factor and Bayesian mixed-effects ordinal regression analyses. We conclude with a range of suggestions for the applied linguistics and SLA, including the use of Bayesian methods in analyzing multivariate, multifactorial data of this kind, and advocating publicly available datasets. In keeping with recommendations for increasing openness of the field, we invite readers to rethink and redo our analyses and interpretations from multiple angles by making our dataset publicly available and coding as part of our 40 th anniversary ARAL article.

This article investigates the inter-personal and intra-personal functions of the discourse marker (DM) okay in sequences of self-directed talk during university Mathematics lectures. This article takes a conversation analytic approach to the use of okay in the self-directed talk of three graduate students giving Mathematics lectures at a U.S university. While research focuses on okay almost exclusively as a transition, our microanalysis reveals that self-directed okay appears in three general locations and functions intra-personally to direct the teachers' attention and inter-personally to mark transitions, to open self-repair sequences, and to verbalize thought processes in sections of discourse in which the lecturer is using non-verbal resources to emphasize information or demonstrating how to do math, which we call pedagogically-directed talk. By using self-directed okay, the three instructors focus their own attention while giving their students insight to their cognitive processes, emphasizing key information, and maintaining joint attention to the interactive practice of the university lecture at a point when student attention could become diverted from the task at hand. Findings suggest that self-directed okay is not merely a transition but concurrently serves critical intra-and inter-personal functions and that resources like self-directed okay should be taught as instructional practices for novice teachers in teacher preparation programs.