pausing patterns: differences between l2 learners and native speakers

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Pausing patterns: differences between L2 learners and native speakers Parvaneh Tavakoli This paper reports on a comparative study of pauses made by L2 learners and native speakers of English while narrating picture stories. The comparison is based on the number of pauses and total amount of silence in the middle and at the end of clauses in the performance of 40 native speakers and 40 L2 learners of English. 1 The results of the quantitative analyses suggest that, although the L2 learners generally pause more repeatedly and have longer periods of silence than the native speakers, the distinctive feature of their pausing pattern is that they pause frequently in the middle of clauses rather than at the end. The qualitative analysis of the data suggests that some of the L2 learners’ mid-clause pauses are associated with processes such as replacement, reformulation, and online planning. Formulaic sequences, however, contain very few pauses and therefore appear to facilitate the learners’ fluency. Introduction L2 learners’ oral performance, particularly at the beginning levels of their L2 development, is usually characterized by dysfluency: their speech is shorter in runs, slower in pace, and interrupted by frequent filled and unfilled pauses. Native speakers of a language, on the other hand, are generally viewed as speakers who produce language of faster speed, longer runs, less hesitation, and fewer lengthy and disruptive pauses. Although the speed at which someone speaks and her/his pausing patterns are to some extent determined by factors such as individual differences and cultural background, native speakers are normally taken to be ‘fluent’ speakers of their L1 who are able to ‘link units of speech together with facility and without strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation’ (Hedge 1993: 275). The question of whether L2 learners should conform to native-speaker norms of English has been recurrently debated over the past couple of decades. However, answering this question or discussing the legitimacy, appropriacy, and necessity of conforming to a native-speaker variety is beyond the scope of the present paper. To help L2 learners develop more effective communication skills, language teachers pay considerable attention to enhancing their learners’ oral fluency. In some language classrooms, teachers build their lessons on activities that encourage students’ fluency, and as such they employ a range of tasks that can help learners produce L2 more effectively in less time. Attaining high ELT Journal Volume 65/1 January 2011; doi:10.1093/elt/ccq020 71 ª The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. Advance Access publication May 11, 2010 at University of California, San Diego on November 17, 2014 http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from

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Page 1: Pausing patterns: differences between L2 learners and native speakers

Pausing patterns: differencesbetween L2 learners andnative speakers

Parvaneh Tavakoli

This paper reports on a comparative study of pauses made by L2 learners andnative speakers of English while narrating picture stories. The comparison is basedon the number of pauses and total amount of silence in the middle and at the endof clauses in the performance of 40 native speakers and 40 L2 learners of English.1

The results of the quantitative analyses suggest that, although the L2 learnersgenerally pause more repeatedly and have longer periods of silence than the nativespeakers, the distinctive feature of their pausing pattern is that they pausefrequently in the middle of clauses rather than at the end. The qualitative analysisof the data suggests that some of the L2 learners’ mid-clause pauses are associatedwith processes such as replacement, reformulation, and online planning.Formulaic sequences, however, contain very few pauses and therefore appear tofacilitate the learners’ fluency.

Introduction L2 learners’ oral performance, particularly at the beginning levels of their L2development, is usually characterized by dysfluency: their speech is shorterin runs, slower in pace, and interrupted by frequent filled and unfilledpauses. Native speakers of a language, on the other hand, are generallyviewed as speakers who produce language of faster speed, longer runs, lesshesitation, and fewer lengthy and disruptive pauses. Although the speed atwhich someone speaks and her/his pausing patterns are to some extentdetermined by factors such as individual differences and culturalbackground, native speakers are normally taken to be ‘fluent’ speakers oftheir L1 who are able to ‘link units of speech together with facility andwithout strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation’ (Hedge 1993:275). The question of whether L2 learners should conform to native-speakernorms of English has been recurrently debated over the past couple ofdecades. However, answering this question or discussing the legitimacy,appropriacy, and necessity of conforming to a native-speaker variety isbeyond the scope of the present paper.

To help L2 learners develop more effective communication skills, languageteachers pay considerable attention to enhancing their learners’ oral fluency.In some language classrooms, teachers build their lessons on activities thatencourage students’ fluency, and as such they employ a range of tasks thatcan help learners produce L2 more effectively in less time. Attaining high

ELT Journal Volume 65/1 January 2011; doi:10.1093/elt/ccq020 71ªª The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.Advance Access publication May 11, 2010

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levels of fluency is an important goal for many language learners, a centralpedagogical objective of some language teaching courses, and an essentialrequirement of some high-profile jobs. Similarly, fluency plays a pivotal rolein defining language proficiency in language testing and assessmentcontexts particularly when language learners are working towards obtaininga language proficiency certificate (Kormos and Denes 2004). In a languageassessment context, fluency is an important descriptor in the assessment offoreign language proficiency and as a result, it is carefully defined,examined, and assessed.

Whereas issues of L2 fluency seem to be fundamental in different domainsof language education, there is little comparative research evidence todemonstrate in what respect(s) L2 learners’ fluency is different from that ofnative speakers, what specifically characterizes this dysfluency, and whatpractical measures can be taken to facilitate L2 fluency. In a larger study towhich the data presented in this article belong, Tavakoli and Foster (2008)and Foster and Tavakoli (2009) examined the effects of task design ondifferent aspects of English L2 learners’ and native speakers’ performance.The results showed that while both the native speakers’ and the L2 learners’performances were affected by storyline complexity, only the L2 learners’fluency was influenced by different task features. These studies revealedthat although the native speakers’ syntactic complexity and lexical diversityare in some ways affected by variations in task demands, the fluency of theirspeech does not vary as a function of task features and cognitive demands.Comparative studies of this type in which native speakers’ and L2 learners’performances are compared will shed light on the differences that existbetween the two and on the features that make one distinct from the other.

Defining fluency Fluency is acknowledged as a difficult construct to define (Freed 2000).Terms such as ‘articulate’, ‘hesitation free’, ‘fast rate of speech’, and ‘smoothperformance’ are just some of the common terms in use that define fluencyof speech. Definitions of fluency span a continuum ranging from a broadersense of fluency sometimes called ‘global oral proficiency’ to a muchnarrower sense that may only represent a small component of oral fluencysuch as speed. In its narrower sense, which is the perspective adopted in thispaper, fluency usually refers to the best use of time constraints whenspeaking or to an uninterrupted stream of smooth and hesitation-freespeech. Fillmore (1979: 51) defines this narrow sense of fluency as ‘theability to talk at length with few pauses, the ability to fill time with talk’.Lennon (2000: 25) defines the narrow sense of fluency as ‘the speed andsmoothness of oral delivery’.

Investigating native and non-native teachers’ perceptions of fluency,Kormos and Denes (op.cit.) maintain that fluency is best conceived of as fast,smooth, and effortless performance. The results of their study suggest thatfluency is primarily a temporal and intonational phenomenon and thatfeatures such as number and length of pauses and speech rate affect fluencyjudgements. Riggenbach (1991) reported that the frequency of unfilledpauses is a strong indicator of dysfluency but stressed the need todifferentiate these pauses according to their place of occurrence and theirfunction.

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In more recent investigations of L2 fluency, particular attention has beenpaid to the multifaceted nature of fluency and to the significance ofmeasuring it carefully. Skehan (2003: 7) argues that:

It is now increasingly accepted that finer grained analyses of fluencyrequire separate measures of (a) silence (breakdown fluency),(b) reformulation, replacement, false starts, and repetition (repairfluency), (c) speech rate (e.g. words per syllables per minute), and(d) automatisation, through measures of length of run.

Research focus Given the significance of pauses and silence as indicators of fluency, the aimof this paper is to find out whether there are differences in the generalpausing pattern of L2 learners and native speakers of English. To achievethis aim and following Skehan’s (ibid.) taxonomy, breakdown fluency of thetwo groups will be compared in terms of number and place of pauses andtotal amount of silence in each performance. Since silent pauses of shorterdurations are known as a key characteristic of native-like speech, unfilledpauses of longer than 0.4 of a second (Freed: op.cit.) are considered asa pause and measured for both L2 learners and native speakers in this study.The following research questions are formulated:

1 Is there a difference between the number of pauses L2 learners and nativespeakers of English make in the middle and at the end of clauses whilenarrating picture stories?

2 Is there a difference between the total amount of silence L2 learners andnative speakers of English produce in the middle and at the end of clauseswhile narrating picture stories?

3 What are the qualitative characteristics of L2 speakers’ pausing patterns?

The research studyParticipants

Two groups of participants took part in this study. The first group was 40native speakers of English, all first-year students of Psychology or Literaturein a university in London. They were 26 females and 14 males, aged between19 and 60, and spoke English as their first language. The second group was40 L2 learners studying English at an intermediate level of proficiency(corresponding to B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference)at a college in London. They were 27 females and 13 males and were agedbetween 19 and 35. They were from a range of different L1 backgrounds andhad lived in London for at least three months prior to the study.

Data and analysis The participants’ oral performances were elicited by use of four oral narrativetasks (picture-story narration). Oral narrative tasks which are monologic innature and therefore do not require interaction with an interlocutor seemedsuitable for the purpose of this study because they allowed for anuninterrupted stream of speech and were low in their interactive demands.Oral narratives are regarded as valid pedagogic tasks and are frequently usedacross different educational settings for teaching, learning, and assessmentpurposes. In the native speakers’ contexts, oral narratives are employed,although to a lesser extent, for assessment, professional, and researchpurposes. The four tasks were carefully selected from EFL teaching materialsby a team of L2 teachers and researchers, and in doing so, a range ofdifferent learner and task factors including familiarity, clarity, and culturalissues was considered. The participants were given two different picture

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stories, one at a time, each consisting of six sequenced picture prompts.They were asked to spend three minutes studying the pictures and planningthe story they were going to tell. They were then asked to narrate the firststory to the researcher while their performances were digitally recorded. Thesame procedures were followed for the second oral narratives.

After the data were transcribed and clause boundaries were determined andcoded in the transcripts, GoldWave Digital Editor was used to measure allthe unfilled pauses greater than 0.4 of a second occurring between and atclause boundaries. The total amount that each participant paused perminute was also calculated and recorded. The data set included thefollowing temporal measures of fluency:

n number of pauses occurring in the middle of clauses

n number of pauses occurring at the end of clauses

n total amount of silence (in seconds) produced in the middle of clauses

n total amount of silence (in seconds) produced at the end of clauses.

First, the data were transferred to SPSS and subjected to statistical analyses.A qualitative analysis of the L2 speakers’ data was then conducted toexamine the characteristics of their pausing pattern.

ResultsQuantitative analysis

A number of t-tests2 were run to find out whether there were any statisticaldifferences between the L2 learners’ and the native speakers’ performancewith respect to the number of pauses and total amount of silence they madewhile narrating the picture stories. To avoid obtaining results emergingfrom the varied effects of task characteristics, the fluency measures for eachof the four tasks were analysed separately. The results of the t-tests areshown in Table 1.

Native speakers L2 learners t P

Task 1Number of pauses mid-clause 3.15 9.42 7.62 0.001*Number of pauses end-clause 8.00 6.59 1.70 0.10Total silence mid-clause 2.58 9.89 6.01 0.001*Total silence end-clause 6.26 6.99 0.72 0.48

Task 2Number of pauses mid-clause 2.71 8.60 5.71 0.001*Number of pauses end-clause 7.82 7.50 0.470 0.641Total silence mid-clause 2.06 8.13 5.74 0.001*Total silence end-clause 5.85 7.52 1.87 0.07

Task 3Number of pauses mid-clause 2.53 8.30 5.66 0.001*Number of pauses end-clause 9.19 6.68 2.25 0.03*Total silence mid-clause 1.89 9.67 6.28 0.001*Total silence end-clause 6.21 7.16 0.90 0.374

Task 4Number of pauses mid-clause 3.65 8.38 4.87 0.001*Number of pauses end-clause 9.50 6.98 3.17 0.003*Total silence mid-clause 2.92 10.54 5.48 0.001*Total silence end-clause 7.00 8.13 1.08 0.284

table 1t-Tests for mean numberof pauses (mid- and end-clause per minute) andtotal amount of silence(mid- and end-clause perminute) in theperformance of L2learners and nativespeakers of English

N ¼ 80 (performance on each task n ¼ 40).

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The results indicated in Table 1 show that although the silence the L2learners produced at the end of clauses was more than the silence the nativespeakers made, this was not statistically significant. The L2 learners,however, produced substantially more silence than the native speakers inthe middle of clauses across the four tasks. With regard to the number ofend-clause pauses, the analysis of the data also indicated that the L2 learnerspaused less frequently than the native speakers on all the four tasks. In thecase of Tasks 3 and 4, this difference reached a significant level (Task 3:t ¼ 2.25, P , 0.03; Task 4: t ¼ 3.17, P , 0.003). With respect to thenumber of mid-clause pauses, the L2 learners paused more frequently thanthe native speakers in the middle of clauses across the four tasks. To sum up,these results suggest that whereas native speakers tended to pause moreoften and produced more silence at clause boundaries, the L2 learnerspaused more frequently and produced more silence in the middle ofclauses.

Qualitative analysis In order to find the recurrent pausing patterns of the L2 speakers’performance, the transcripts of both data sets were carefully inspected.Given that the end-clause pauses are considered as a legitimatecharacteristic of native-like fluency, only mid-clause pauses wereinvestigated in this part of the analysis. In each data set, the mid-clausepauses were examined in the context of their occurrence and with regard toother processes (if any) that were taking place while the pauses occurred.It should be acknowledged that this qualitative analysis will by no meansprovide a thorough and exhaustive account of what processes were involvedwhen the L2 learners paused, or establish a causal relationship that canexplicate the dysfluency in L2 performance. This analysis, however, is hopedto provide some insight into the frequent locations of pauses, the linguisticor cognitive processes that appeared to be occurring while the pauses weremade, and any other linguistic elements that may be associated witha pause. It seems evident that for a more careful investigation of why suchpauses occur and to have an in-depth analysis of the processes involved indysfluency, think-aloud protocols and retrospective interviews will provemore effective.

It is worth noting that the inspections of the native-speaker data set did notshow any recurrent pattern for mid-clause pausing mainly because therewere very few of them in each performance. As a result, it has not beenpossible to provide a regular pattern for the native-speaker mid-clausepauses or a qualitative analytic comparison of the L2 and native speakers’pausing patterns. In the case of the L2 learners’ mid-clause pauses, thefollowing categories were identified. In the examples from the L2 speakers’data set that follow, the numbers in brackets show the length of pauses persecond.

Repetition and replacement pausesA number of pauses occurring at mid-clause positions were followed byrepetitions and replacements. The L2 learners often paused before theyrepeated a vocabulary item or when they substituted a word or an expressionwith another. This type of pause can perhaps be understood in light of the

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information processing load associated with repetition and replacementprocesses.

Example 1: on a lovely day (0.60) children eh play football near home(1.36) near home [change of intonation to signal the completion of theutterance]Example 2: the child eh (0.55) children are at school

Reformulation pausesThe L2 learners often paused after they abandoned a language structure andbefore they reformulated and reproduced it in a new form. This suggeststhat the L2 speakers paused while they were thinking about how to changethe structure of an utterance or how to reshape what they had said. Thepauses occurring before reformulations may indicate that the speaker ismonitoring his/her own performance or checking whether what he/she issaying is accurate and appropriate.

Example 3: and they thought what they (2.19) what happened and their(1.4) eh and they walk awayExample 4: and eh he couldn’t hear eh a big (.85) I don’t know the name(0.9) eh I don’t know eh (0.9) an animal

It is interesting to see that the two different aspects of fluency, i.e.breakdown and repair, interact with and affect one another: a pause cansignal a repetition or replacement and a reformulation can be preceded orfollowed by a pause. There are different examples in the data in which the L2speakers pause to repeat, replace, or reformulate a word or an utterance. Asa result, it seems very difficult to separate breakdown and repair fluency or todiscuss them individually.

Online planning pausesThere is evidence in the data to suggest that some pauses occurred whilesome online planning was taking place. The L2 learners sometimes pausedwhen they were formulating their thoughts, trying to find out more aboutthe events that were developing in the story, reminding themselves aboutthe details of the story, and planning for what they wanted to say. Onlineplanning has long been identified as an active process involved in L1 and L2speech production (particularly in longer turns or stretches of talk),enabling speakers to plan their output through speech production (Yuanand Ellis 2003).

Example 5: and he went home (0.53) and eh (0.73) his wife (0.65) eh orhis girlfriend (0.89) probably ask him (1.00) perhaps some question[change of intonation to signal uncertainty]Example 6: the boy eh look down eh the hole (0.75) and eh (1.69) oh yeah(0.63) the snake is there

Non-formulaic sequence pausesThe L2 learners in this data set hardly ever paused in the middle ofa formulaic sequence. In other words, the majority of the mid-clause pausesoccurred outside lexical units and formulaic sequences. Examples of suchsequences are ‘in the morning’, ‘have a good time’, ‘a nice day’, ‘I don’tknow’, and ‘walking down the street’. Since these units are said to be

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produced as a single unit rather than a combination of different words, theyare believed to be produced more automatically and as such they require lessattention. Current research argues that as ‘lexical chunks are ‘‘ready to go’’,and require little or no additional processing’, they facilitate fluency(Schmitt 2000: 400).

It is crucially important to bear in mind that there are a considerablenumber of mid-clause pauses in the L2 speakers’ data set for which it has notbeen possible to provide a category or an explanation into why they are madeor what triggers them. Further research is undoubtedly needed to shed lighton the highly complicated nature of this type of pause.

Example 7: and (.56) suddenly (.63) one boy (.63) miss the ballExample 8: and then (.92) the first one (.63) had (.78) such a big eh caraccident

Discussion These results suggest that the main difference between the pausingpatterns of the L2 learners and native speakers of English in the currentstudy is not in the number of pauses or the amount of silence in theirperformance, rather it is more contingent on where these pauses occur.Research has provided evidence that non-native speakers of a lowerproficiency level pause more frequently and produce more silence in theirspeech than the more proficient L2 speakers and native speakers. However,the important finding of this study is that the L2 learners pause statisticallymore than the native speakers only in mid-clause positions. Interestingly,the number of pauses they make at the end of clauses is either fewer than orequal to those made by the native speakers.

It is argued that native speakers normally pause at the end of a clause orutterance to allow breathing space, organize their performance and indicatethat one thought is over and the next one is just about to come. On the otherhand, the results of this study imply that the L2 learners pause, particularlyin mid-clause positions, perhaps in search of a word, a structure, a correctpronunciation, or to think and plan for their speech. This clearly impliesthat L2 learners’ silence and pauses are an indication of the informationprocessing load associated with L2 acquisition.

The qualitative analysis of the data suggests that these mid-clause pauses areusually, but not always, associated with other linguistic and cognitiveprocesses. The information processing, repair mechanisms, monitoring,and online planning are only some of the processes at work when thesepauses occur. Although studying the relationship between these processesand mid-clause pausing patterns of L2 speakers might reveal valuableinsights into why these pauses occur and how the L2 learners employ themto deal with the various demands of L2 speech production, for reasons offocus and scope it cannot be examined here.

Second language acquisition research has research has revealed thatincrease in fluency comes along with development in other aspects oflanguage proficiency. For example, it is believed that when knowledge of L2becomes procedural (i.e. the automatic processes operate without consciouscontrol), L2 speakers speak in longer units and therefore pause less. Somealso argue that fluency cannot be taught separately, and it will emerge

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naturally as a result of meaningful exposure to and practice in authenticlanguage communication (Chambers 1997). Although it seems, in a way,impossible to discuss pausing patterns and hesitation phenomenon inisolation or without reference to other aspects of language proficiency, thesignificance of a narrowed-down perspective to fluency and the resultsemerging from research in this perspective should not be undermined. It isnecessary to mention that working on the two ends of the fluencycontinuum does not seem to be mutually exclusive.

Another important finding of this study is that the L2 learners, like thenative speakers, hardly ever paused while producing formulaic sequences.Corpus linguistics research has demonstrated that native speakers draw ontheir unlimited knowledge of formulaic sequences when using andproducing language (O’Keeffe, McCarthy, and Carter 2007; Schmitt:op.cit.). The native speakers’ recurrent use of formulaic sequences in thisstudy could potentially explicate why there were not many mid-clausepauses in their performance, while the L2 speakers paused quite frequentlyin mid-clause positions. O’Keeffe et al. (op.cit.: 77), among otherresearchers, argue that formulaic sequences improve fluency since theyhave phonological unity, i.e. ‘they need to be said fast and all in one go’.

Implications forlanguage teaching

Although some may argue that fluency cannot be taught separately and itwill emerge naturally as a result of exposure to and practice in authenticlanguage communication (Chambers: op.cit.), the central role of languageteachers in improving the breakdown fluency dimension should not beunderestimated. L2 learners may not be aware of the differences betweentheir pausing patterns and those of native speakers. There is some researchevidence to suggest that L2 learners are often unaware of how far removedtheir performance is from a target-like performance (Scales, Wennerstorm,Richard, and Hui Wu 2006). This lack of sensitivity or unawareness mayadd to the complexity of how such problems can be dealt with in languageclassrooms. The first pedagogical implication these results can have istherefore for teachers to raise their learners’ awareness about the differencesbetween the way they pause through their speech and what they areexpected to do. L2 learners should become aware that becoming a fluentspeaker is not only dependent on how infrequently they pause or how fastthey speak but whether they interrupt a clause with long pauses.

Given that ‘the ability to use preformed lexical chunks allows greater fluencyin production’ (Schmitt: op.cit.), L2 learners should develop learningstrategies that help them learn the L2 in more formulaic sequences.Teachers’ prime responsibility in this regard lies in selecting the sequencesthat are more useful to the learners and encouraging their use. Suchactivities may initially be more teacher dependent but with time learnerswill acquire the knowledge and skills needed to focus on identifying andlearning the formulaic sequences.

If fluency is a skill exercised in real time (Lennon 2000), then this skill canbe taught and practised in language classrooms. L2 learners can be trainedto speak in real time, to record themselves, and to assess and compare theirperformance with the target they are hoping to achieve. During the pre-taskor post-task phases, teachers can encourage learners to focus on and

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evaluate the temporal aspects of their performance. The use of softwaresuch as Goldwave Digital Editor in which the pauses are digitally capturedand graphically represented might help learners to form a better visualpicture of the frequency and location of pauses in their performance.

Final revised version received December 2009

Notes1 The data discussed in this article belong to a larger

research project funded by the Economic andSocial Research Council of the United Kingdom,award reference RES-000-22-11555.

2 t-Tests are used to assess whether the means oftwo groups are statistically different from eachother. T-values refer to the differences betweenthe two means, and an alpha level (P , 0.05)is set to determine if the obtained results arestatistically meaningful. In this study, thealpha levels smaller than 0.05 are consideredsignificant and are marked by asterisks inTable 1.

ReferencesChambers, F. 1997. ‘What do we mean by fluency?’.System 25/4: 535–44.Fillmore, C. J. 1979. ‘On fluency’, republished inH. Riggenbach (ed.) (2000).Foster, P. andP. Tavakoli.2009. ‘Native speakers andtask performance: comparing effects on complexity,fluency and lexical diversity’. Language Learning59/4: 866–96.Freed, B. 2000. ‘Is fluency, like beauty, in the eyes(and ears) of the beholder?’ in H. Riggenbach (ed.).Hedge, T. 1993. ‘Key concepts in ELT: fluency’. ELTJournal 47/3: 275–6.Kormos, J. and M. Denes. 2004. ‘Exploringmeasures and perceptions of fluency in the speechof second language learners’. System 32/2: 145–64.Lennon, P. 2000. ‘The lexical element in spokensecond language fluency’ in H. Riggenbach (ed.).O’Keeffe, A., M.McCarthy, and R. Carter. 2007. FromCorpus to Classroom: Language Use and

Language Teaching. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.Riggenbach, H. 1991. ‘Toward an understanding offluency: a microanalysis of non-native speakerconversations’. Discourse Processes 14/4: 423–41.Riggenbach, H. (ed.). 2000. Perspectives on Fluency.Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Scales, J., A. Wennerstorm, D. Richard, and S. HuiWu. 2006. ‘Language learners’ perceptions ofaccent’. TESOL Quarterly 40/4: 715–38.Schmitt, N. 2000. ‘Key concepts in ELT: lexicalchunks’. ELT Journal 54/4: 400–1.Skehan, P. 2003. ‘Task-based instruction’. LanguageTeaching 36: 1–14.Tavakoli, P. and P. Foster. 2008. ‘Task design andsecond language performance: the effect of narrativetype on learner output’. Language Learning 58/2:439–73.Yuan, F. and R. Ellis. 2003. ‘The effects of pre-taskplanning and on-line planning on fluency,complexity and accuracy in L2 monologic oralproduction’. Applied Linguistics 24/1: 1–27.

The authorParvaneh Tavakoli is a senior lecturer at LondonMetropolitan University. She holds an MA in TEFL

and a PhD in Applied Linguistics. She has worked asan EFL/ESOL teacher, teacher educator, andresearcher in Iran and Britain. Her research interestsare L2 acquisition, task-based language teaching,language assessment, and TESOL pedagogy.Email: [email protected]

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