Repeats in advanced spoken English of learners with Czech as L1

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.

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