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Recent growth of English as an international language of communication highlights the importance of speaking which everyone needs to use in a multiplicity of contexts. Scholars have shown that concept mapping increases vocabulary learning, and organization of knowledge. However, its impact on enhancing speaking fluency is overlooked. This research project investigates the effect of concept mapping on speaking fluency of Iranian intermediate EFL students. To achieve its purpose, the following research question was proposed: Does concept mapping have any statistically significant effect on speaking fluency of the aforementioned students? 80 second term EFL university students were randomly selected and were randomly assigned to a control and experimental group. We employed concept mapping in the experimental group for twenty two sessions. When the treatment was over a proficiency test was administered to the students as a post-test. The distributions of scores for each variable by all subjects were examined and the results showed that concept mapping had statistically significant effect on speaking fluency of intermediate EFL students.         

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In L2 instruction and assessment, the application of research findings that adopt an integrative, psycholinguistic approach to explore the information-processing and speech-management facets of fluency seems necessary. This paper reports on a study that drew on Levelt’s (1989, 1999) speaking-specific model to probe the problem-solving mechanisms (PSMs) of fluent and nonfluent L2 speakers through a speaking-oriented questionnaire and a series of output-related retrospective interviews. The fluent and nonfluent L2 speakers were identified using a newly-developed analytic fluency scale and the task-related speech samples of 200 participants. The results revealed that the fluent L2 speakers employed cognitive, linguistic, and interactional PSMs more frequently and with greater facility than the nonfluent participants particularly to compensate for deficits in their conceptual repertoire, bridge communication gaps, and negotiate the intended meaning with their interlocutors. Specifically, they efficiently reshaped the preverbal plan to avoid failure, adeptly employed a variety of fillers and hesitation devices to maintain the communication flow, and attentively monitored the conversation. However, the nonfluent L2 speakers entirely abandoned or completely changed their original speech plan after running into deficiencies in their own outputs that made their speech utterly disjointed. Still at times, they struggled to self-correct their speech but failed due to deficient linguistic and interactional competence, which adversely led to more disfluencies. The findings suggest that further research into the cognitive, linguistic, and interactional processes underlying (non)fluent speakers’ use of PSMs can be useful in explaining speech disfluencies or learners’ differential L2 fluency.

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This study compares three integrated tasks of the TOEFL iBT speaking subtest in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. To this end, a group of TOEFL iBT Iranian candidates took a simulated TOEFL iBT some days prior to their real exam. The collected oral responses were first transcribed and then quantified using software such as ‘Syllable Counter’ and ‘Coh-Metrix3’ for fluency and complexity, respectively. For accuracy, however, the responses were tallied manually. The results revealed the responses to the three speaking tasks were significantly different in terms of fluency. The difference in the accuracy index also turned significant, though the pairwise comparisons showed some inconsistencies. As for the selected complexity measures, lexical diversity, the mean number of modifiers per NP, and latent semantic analysis all showed significant differences between tasks 2 and 3 on the one hand and task 4 on the other. Left-embeddedness, however, revealed no significant difference among the three tasks. The results may support the influential role of prompting texts in such integrated speaking tasks

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Fluent reading is a multifaceted ability that integrates several linguistic and non-linguistic processes. Accordingly, recognizing the critical components of fluent reading is highly significant in planning and implementing effective reading programs. This study was undertaken to evaluate the predictive power of syntactic knowledge, vocabulary breadth, and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies in the reading fluency of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, a sample of 149 Iranian EFL language learners took the Vocabulary Levels Test, Survey of Reading Strategies Questionnaire (SORS), a TOEFL PBT, and a fluency test. The linear regression results indicated that vocabulary breadth was the first predictor of readers' performance on reading fluency, followed by metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. At the same time, syntactic knowledge was not entered into the regression model. Moreover, the findings confirmed the contribution of both linguistic and non-linguistic processes to reading fluency. Having a clear picture of fluency components can be advantageous to teaching reading comprehension and test score predictability.