The Influence of working memory on L2 oral fluency: an exploratory study

Abstract

The goal of this exploratory study is to investigate the effect of working memory capacity on L2 oral fluency in 79 learners of English as a foreign language. Three tasks were used as measures of working memory (the reading span task, letter span task and an attention-switching task). Twelve measures of fluency were used spanning across speed, breakdown and repair fluency. Positive correlations were found with measures of repair fluency, specifically morphosyntactic, differency, and other repairs whereas negative correlations were found for lexical repairs. When participants were divided into groups based on proficiency, potential relationships were found between working memory and speed/breakdown fluency suggesting the possible existence of proficiency thresholds affecting the relationship between working memory and fluency. The results are discussed in light of previous research and De Bot’s (1992) model of L2 speech production.