AUC PHILOLOGICA
AUC PHILOLOGICA

AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.

The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.

AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2017 No 3 (2017), 65–78

Repeats in advanced spoken English of learners with Czech as L1

Tomáš Gráf

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2017.34
published online: 01. 09. 2017

abstract

The article reports on the findings of an empirical study of the use of repeats – as one of the markers of disfluency – in advanced learner English and contributes to the study of L2 fluency. An analysis of 13 hours of recordings of interviews with 50 advanced learners of English with Czech as L1 revealed 1,905 instances of repeats which mainly (78%) consisted of one-word repeats occurring at the beginning of clauses and constituents. Two-word repeats were less frequent (19%) but appeared in the same positions within the utterances. Longer repeats are much rarer (<2.5%). A comparison with available analyses show that Czech advanced learners of English use repeats in a similar way as advanced learners of English with a different L1 and also as native speakers. If repeats are accepted as fluencemes, i.e. components contributing to fluency, it would appear clear that many advanced learners either successfully adopt this native-like strategy either as a result of exposure to native speech or as transfer from their L1s. Whilst a question remains whether such fluency enhancing strategies ought to become part of L2 instruction, it is argued that spoken learner corpora also ought to include samples of the learners’ L1 production.

keywords: fluency; disfluency; repeats; repetitions; L2 fluency; fluencemes

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Repeats in advanced spoken English of learners with Czech as L1 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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ISSN: 0567-8269
E-ISSN: 2464-6830

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