ABSTRACT
The goal of this book is to develop a cognitive science perspective on L2 fluency. There are two reasons why this goal is worth pursuing. The first reason is that L2 fluency in the real world matters for all sorts of social, economic, and personal reasons. Although not all L2 speakers aspire to-or should aspire to-nativelike or near-nativelike levels of speaking ability, an L2 user’s fluency level can have socioeconomic consequences. For this reason fluency development is not something peripheral to successful language development. The second reason is that if we want to understand and do something about increasing L2 fluency, then we need to shed piecemeal approaches to this issue, such as looking at fluency from one relatively narrow angle at a time. We should seek, instead, an overarching perspective capable of bringing to light crucial questions that otherwise might be missed. The ideal framework is one in which different disciplines are involved in a mutually supportive way, not just complementary and independent of each other. The cognitive science framework proposed in this volume is intended as a starting point for achieving this. This chapter will review the conclusions drawn from the studies examined earlier in an effort to weave them together into a comprehensive, cognitive-science-based account of L2 fluency.
