Is there an Increase in Fluency over Levels of Proficiency? A Study of English L2 Usage of Japanese University Students

Oral fluency is one of the more difficult variables to track and to measure in L2 speech. This paper reports on an empirical study to identify how fluency in both monologues and dialogues changes over three ranges of proficiency as marked by the TOEIC standardized test. Twenty-seven Japanese students were asked to give a self-introduction monologue, which was then followed by a three-question dialogue. Based on the TOEIC scores of these participants, three groups were formed, with the first group having scores that ranged from 150 to 370, the second from 371 to 570, and the third from 571 to 770. The interactions were videotaped and transcribed with the transcriptions making up the Japanese University Student Fluency Corpus (JUSFC2018), which has 23,539 words. Research questions focused on significant differences among the three groups concerning the variables of monologue speaking time, dialogue speaking time, total speaking time, articulation rate, speaking rate, and the number of words spoken, and mean length runs. Results showed that for the first two proficiency groups monologue speaking time, speaking rates, and the number of words spoken showed significant differences, whereas in comparing the second and third proficiency groups, no significant differences were found. Furthermore, fluency showed a decrease on all variables with the highest proficiency group.