Fluency in L2: Read and Spontaneous Speech Pausing Patterns of Turkish, Swahili, Hausa and Arabic Speakers of English

Language learners’ actual speech performances constitute an essential aspect of studies on second language learning and teaching. Although there is ample research on fluency and pauses in English, current literature does not touch on this issue from a multilingual perspective by comparing both read and spontaneous speech performances. In this descriptive study, the researchers investigated pausing patterns with 40 Turkish, Swahili, Hausa, and Arabic speakers of English. For the read speech fragments’ elicitation, the participants read out a short story, and for spontaneous speech, the data was gathered through structured interviews. In total, 4007 pauses were measured through Praat, and the findings obtained from the data were analyzed using multiple regression and several multivariate analyses of variance. The findings revealed crucial insights into the nature of fluency research in terms of (a) speech registers, (b) positions, (c) conjunctions, and (d) mother tongues.