ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the first anchor question guiding this book, What features of L2 oral performance are reliable indicators of fluency? As currently formulated, this question provides a good place to begin an inquiry into L2 fluency. However, as we will see, it is based on some widely accepted assumptions that turn out to be problematic, and so it will be reformulated later in the chapter. Now, over the past several decades many applied linguists have been concerned with identifying a set of critical features of oral production that might be diagnostic of L2 fluency. They have tried to identify aspects of L2 speech that could reliably be associated with fluency, such as speech rate or the way pauses and hesitations are distributed in speech. It was hoped that the availability of such objective indicators would reduce reliance on what some might consider to be less objective methods, such as listener judgments of fluency. The search for measurable features of fluency has also been motivated to a large extent by their potential usefulness in evaluating approaches to L2 training aimed at promoting fluency. This chapter reviews some of the main studies in this area, with the goal of identifying the most promising approaches to finding indicators of fluency. The chapter ends by listing critical points to bring forward to the final chapter.
