Fluency in ENL, ESL and EFL: A contrastive corpus-based study of English as a first, second, and foreign language

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Sandra Götz; Dr. Christoph Wolk
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 367785882

The present project takes a holistic approach to investigate the fluency of speakers of English as a first language (ENL), a second language (ESL) and as a foreign language (EFL). As a database for the corpus analysis, we will use several components of the International Corpus of English (ICE; Nelson 1996) and the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI; Gilquin et al. 2010). In order to systematically assess how speakers of these three different types of Englishes establish fluency, these corpora will be analyzed for the linguistic variables that can potentially have an effect on the fluency of a speaker (i.e. fluencemes; Götz 2013: 8-9). For this purpose, an integrated, fluenceme-based taxonomy will be used to make it possible to describe fluency on three different levels: (1) the temporal variables in speech production (e.g. the length of runs, pause ratio, speech rate, etc.) as well as how speakers make use of fluency-enhancing strategies (e.g. discourse markers or prefabricated units), (2) the (potential combinations of) different/several fluencemes to overcome planning difficulties (fluenceme chunking) as well as their positions in the utterance (fluenceme positioning), and (3) correlations of fluencemes with extralinguistic variables (e.g. gender, age) that can predict the type and use of fluencemes in different types of Englishes (fluenceme preferencing).All the investigated fluencemes per speaker will be extracted from the corpora automatically and manually and qualitatively post-processed and disambiguated, after which they can be statistically analyzed. This process makes it possible to test if speakers of different types of Englishes are more or less fluent than others, if fluency is established in different ways (e.g. by using different fluencemes) in different types of Englishes, if planning phases are overcome in different ways in different types of Englishes and in different positions in the utterance, and if fluency and fluency-enhancing strategies can be predicted by extra-linguistic parameters, such as age or gender.The present project thus presents the first holistic description of fluency in different types of Englishes contrastively and will thus make a relevant contribution to variety studies, second language acquisition and applied corpus linguistics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants