Revisiting the Temporal Measures of L2 Oral Fluency: A Case of Iranian EFL Learners

Objective judgment about second language (L2) proficiency of language learners has always concerned researchers and specialists in language teaching and testing who should promote and assess learners’ proficiency. L2 oral fluency as a subcomponent of oral proficiency, being too much dependent on subjective judgment of evaluators, needs to be studied quantitatively in this regard. This study was designed to investigate the role of quantitative measures in assessment of L2 spoken fluency. In an effort to explore assessment of fluency in oral speech of L2 learners, temporal measures of fluency were examined in picture-task elicited speech of eight Iranian intermediate learners of English and the results were correlated with scores of two native and one nonnative speaker judges. The results of this study showed strong positive correlations of speech rate and judges’ scores implicating the robustness of this temporal variable.