Beginner Students’ Speech Fluency in a Second Language Compared Across Two Contexts of Acquisition

Abstract

This chapter describes an empirical investigation of speech fluency in German as a second language (L2) at beginner level compared across two contexts of L2 acquisition—a study abroad in Germany and a study at a home university in Australia. Twenty English first language (L1) beginner students of German L2 participated in the study. Ten participants studied German in Germany and ten their respective controls studied German at their home university. All the participants and their respective controls were tested on a range of speech elicitation tasks involving free recalls from/into German and spontaneous story generation in German. Participants’ speech in the experimental tasks was recorded and analysed in PRAAT (Boersma and Weenink 2010), a speech processing software package. Speech fluency measures involved mean duration of long pauses, total pausing time, total speaking time, mean speech segment duration and speech/pause ratio. Whilst speech fluency measures across the experimental tasks were found to be not statistically significant, statistical analysis revealed a decrease in long pauses in free recall tasks in the group of participants compared with the control group. The findings can be taken to indicate that the study abroad context of L2 acquisition facilitates speech fluency in L2 in cognitively demanding speech production tasks, such as free recall, but does not have an impact upon less cognitively taxing tasks, such as story generation task.