ABSTRACT
Identifying cognitive fluency as a learner’s ability to efficiently plan and produce speech necessitates considerations of how speech production occurs. One strand of research in which second language (L2) fluency has been investigated with learner corpora explores the extent to which the utterance fluency of learners differs from that of native speakers. As a general approach, work in this area compares the fluency characteristics of native and non-native speaker speech from talkers who have completed identical or similar tasks. In addition to cross-sectional corpora, longitudinal corpora have also been used to investigate L2 fluency development. This chapter discusses main research methods and tools that have been used in learner corpus research to investigate L2 fluency, including common types of speech data, utterance fluency measurements, and the software and tools used for data transcription, coding, and analysis. When conducting a scan of the L2 fluency literature, it becomes quickly apparent that measures of oral fluency are varied and diverse.
