Perceptions of French Fluency in Second Language Speech Production

Abstract: Recent literature in second language (L2) perceived fluency has focused on English as a second language, with a primary reliance on impressions from native-speaker judges, leaving learners’ self-perceptions of speech production unexplored. This study investigates the relationship between learners’ and judges’ perceptions of French fluency under three different task conditions. It also addresses how self-perception of fluency is linked to actual measures of utterance fluency. Participants were 40 adult learners of French at varying levels of proficiency, studying in a university immersion context. The results indicate moderate correlation between L2 learners’ and judges’ perceptions of fluency and offer evidence to validate self-assessment use in language-learning contexts. Across tasks, two measures of utterance fluency were most strongly related to self-perceptions of fluency: mean length of runs and average pause time. The results also revealed the influence of task complexity on L2 fluent performance and are discussed according to the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001, 2003, 2005).