(By correspondent Keting Cao)
On May 28th, Professor Yan Xun from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) visited the School of Foreign Languages and delivered a lecture entitled “Disfluency doesn’t happen in isolation: The benefits of ‘contextualizing’ fluency in accessing oral language proficiency”. The lecture, presided over by Professor Xuefeng Feng, Director of the Research Center for Foreign Language Education, attracted staff, postgraduates and undergraduates of the School of Foreign Languages to exchange ideas and learn from each other.
The lecture centered on speech fluency, providing a thorough examination from theoretical foundations to practical applications. Professor Yan first elucidated the complexity of fluency in L2 speaking assessment through concrete examples, demonstrating how it encompasses cognitive fluency, utterance fluency, and perceived fluency. Building on this framework, Professor Yan then presented quantitative measures for assessing fluency, including speech rate, pause frequency (both silent and filled pauses), and repair features, while highlighting their relationship with language proficiency. Based on research findings from a large-scale oral speech corpus, Professor Yan demonstrated the differences in speech fluency features among learners at different proficiency levels. He emphasized the need to incorporate multiple fluency features - particularly fine-grained disfluency characteristics - to accurately evaluate learners’ language abilities. Finally, by introducing a more detailed analysis of fluency features, Professor Yan proposed suggestions for improving speech assessment methods, stressing the importance of considering multiple fluency features in assessment to more comprehensively reflect learners’ language proficiency.
The session concluded with a Q&A segment where Professor Yan addressed queries from attendees, sparking lively academic discourse. Participants universally lauded the lecture for its richness in content, deeming it not only lively and intriguing but also highly enlightening.
