This study examines L2 fluency in speaking interactions based on the number and type of utterances. The participants were 25 Korean eighth-grade learners of English as a foreign language. They performed five communicative tasks in groups, and their speaking interactions were audio-recorded and analyzed to measure the frequencies of sentence-level and word-level utterances. Results showed that learners of different levels of L2 fluency greatly varied in their frequencies of sentence-level utterances. Construction-based analyses found that the frequency variation in sentence-level utterances was primarily attributable to the transitive construction and a small set of intransitive constructions. Further investigation of the transitive complementation patterns suggested that L2 learners’ use of the nominal complementation [V+NP] became more productive as they expanded their repertoires of transitive complementation in developmental sequence based on a set of complementation clusters. Regarding these acquisitional patterns of the constructions in respect to L2 fluency development, the present study concludes with pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies.

1. INTRODUCTION
2. BACKGROUND
    2.1. L2 English Fluency in Speaking Interactions
    2.2. Constructions of English Utterances
3. METHOD
    3.1. Participants
    3.2. Tasks
    3.3. Procedures
    3.4. Data Coding and Analysis
4. RESULTS
    4.1. Utterance-Based Fluency in L2 Speaking Interactions
    4.2. Argument Structure Constructions in L2 Speaking Interactions
    4.3. Usage Patterns of Transitive Construction in L2 Speaking Interactions
5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
REFERENCES

• Jungyoun Choi(Department of Second Language Studies, Indiana University Bloomington)
• Min-Chang Sung(Department of English Language Education, Gyeongin National University of Education) Corresponding Author