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Fluency is defined as ‘the ability to produce the L2 with native-like rapidity, pausing, hesitation, or reformulation’ (Housen et al., 2012, p. 2). The term fluency encompasses both a general, popular understanding akin to proficiency or competence and a more specific, specialist interpretation within Applied Linguistics that views the concept as a temporal construct. Within this specialist interpretation (i.e. the CAF framework), fluency is distinguished from speech accuracy and speech complexity and comprises characteristics of the speech such as speed, length, instances of repetition, and the duration and position of pauses and hesitations.

Measurement of fluency involves analysis of the speed of speech delivery and the extent to which breakdown fluency (pausing) and repair fluency (false starts, reformulation) occur in the speech (Skehan, 2009). Kormos (2006) discusses two measures of fluency that frequently appear in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature and are particularly relevant for this study: speech rate and phonation time ratio. Speech rate is the total number of syllables/words produced in the text divided by the total speaking time expressed in seconds. This number is then multiplied by sixty to represent syllables/words per minute (Kormos, 2006). It provides an indication of the speed with which speech is produced. Speech rate increased after pre-task planning in Guara-Tavares (2009), and Li et al. (2014). For an example of how pre-task planning affects speech rate, Li et al. (2014) report that the mean

number of syllables increased from 112.49 after planning for 30 seconds to 134.86 after planning for five minutes. Research has also used pruned speech rate as an indication of speech fluency. This is a similar measure to speech rate that involves removing all pauses and hesitations from the final calculation. Pruned speech rate was shown to increase after pre-task planning in Sangarun (2005), Gilabert (2007), Guara- Tavares (2009), Geng and Ferguson (2013) and Nielson (2013).

The second measure discussed by Kormos (2006) is phonation-time ratio, which is a measure of breakdown fluency. This measure compares the total amount of time spent speaking with the total amount of time spent pausing. It provides a strong indication of the amount of task time that the speaker spends producing speech. To calculate this measure, identify the amount of silent task time in seconds and subtract this number from the total task time. The result of this calculation is divided by the total task time and reported as a percentage. Bui and Huang (2016) report that pre- task planning increased phonation-time ratio from 76 per cent to 82 per cent.

Speech rate and phonation-time ratio can be calculated with an acoustic analysis of the speech sample. However, Field (2011) suggests that a more thorough, qualitative analysis is required to generate a comprehensive measure of fluency. Pauses, gaps in speech that occur between syntactic boundaries, must be distinguished from hesitations, gaps that occur within syntactic boundaries. This distinction is important because pauses are a common feature of all speech and fulfill a necessary role of allowing the speaker to generate content. In contrast, hesitation shows that some form of extra effort and attention is required to complete an utterance. Excessive hesitation is caused by gaps in language proficiency and is more likely to

effect an interlocutor’s impression of fluency than pauses (Field, 2011). Kormos (2006) describes pauses and hesitations as a period of silence in excess of .25 seconds, whereas Foster and Skehan (1996) set the criteria as silence in excess of one second. Calculations of the number of pauses and hesitations using Foster and Skehan’s criteria (1996) have figured frequently as measures of fluency in the pre- task planning literature (Foster and Skehan, 1996, Foster and Skehan, 1999, Nitta and Nakatsuhara, 2014,Skehan and Foster, 1997, Skehan and Foster, 2005, Tavakoli and Skehan, 2005). This research has produced consistent evidence that the number of pauses and hesitations decreases after a period of pre-task planning. For example, Skehan and Foster (1997) demonstrated that the number of pauses decreased from 23.8 to 6.0 after pre-task planning on a picture-based narrative task.

Pauses and hesitations may involve periods of silence during the task or may be filled with fillers such as erm, um, or mmm. Filled pauses and hesitations are very common in spoken discourse and serve the same purpose as unfilled pauses and hesitations (Kormos, 2006). In the pre-task planning literature, Skehan and Foster (2005) report that the number of filled pauses decreased after pre-task planning.

Manual identification of pauses and hesitation allows for additional, more detailed phonological analysis of the speech such as mean length of utterance, which is a measure of the number of words produced between filled/unfilled pauses and hesitations. The ability to produce speech without having to pause or hesitate is a key indicator of language proficiency. Field (2011) describes the mean length of utterance as a measure of the extent to which the processes of language retrieval and encoding of the speech have become proceduralised. In the literature, mean length of utterance

(referred to as ‘mean length of run’) increased in Li et al. (2014, p. 9) from 5.76 without planning to 6.94 after three minutes planning.

Limitations in the study of CAF are discussed in the following section (Section 2.7.2.4). However, Fulcher (2015) specifically discusses limitations in the use of the kinds of fluency measures discussed in the previous paragraphs and is therefore included in this section. Fulcher views fluency as context dependent and as a quality that the listener is attuned to. Fulcher (2015, p. 76) stresses that fluency measures do not account for the influence of the environmental context on language use: ‘what then can be the purpose of simply counting pauses, or measuring pause length or speech rate, when these vary for a variety of reasons, only some of which are related to L2 language proficiency’. Fulcher (2015, p. 80) concludes by stating ‘with the help of a rating tool, the most reliable and valid measures of spoken fluency come from human judges’. Though language learners do pause for reasons of pragmatics, at the early stages of L2 proficiency, a great deal of cognitive effort and attention is required to produce speech (Field, 2011). This cognitive effort impacts the degree to which pauses and hesitations are necessary; more effort requires more hesitation. Measures of speech rate and phonation time ratio supply important information about the degree of effort and attention required to communicate a message, which is a key indication of language proficiency. As the pre-task planning literature consistently shows that planning impacts speech fluency, it is important to investigate the impact of planning on fluency in the present study.