Exploring the Relation Between L1 and L2 Oral Fluency Across Proficiency

L2 oral fluency is affected by a number of factors one of which can be the fluency of L2 learners in their L1 (Cox and Baker-Smemoe, 2014). The current study was an endeavor to investigate the relationship between L1 and L2 oral fluency across oral proficiency. To this end, 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students majoring in English Literature participated in the study. Both groups went through an oral interview after which they were placed into intermediate and advanced levels of language proficiency. The learners were then administered a picture description task both in Persian and English with a two-week interval. The obtained data were analyzed in terms of the number of syllables produced per minute, number of pauses, and the mean length of pauses by Praat software. The statistical analysis of the data using Pearson product moment correlation revealed that there was a significant high correlation between L1 and L2 fluency in terms of the number of syllables (r=0.60). Moreover, the results of the independent samples t-test indicated that there was a significant difference between the mean number of syllables in the two groups, that is the advanced group outperformed the intermediates. These findings offer valuable insights into the complex relationship between L1 and L2 fluency—namely, that a straightforward relationship between fluency in the L1 and the L2 cannot be expected.