This article reports on an experimental study that investigated the effects of different conditions of listener backchannels on the fluency of L2 speakers. The participants were 15 advanced Chinese learners of Korean who performed oral tasks in three different backchannel conditions: (1) verbal + nonverbal (V+NV), (2) nonverbal-only (NV), and (3) no backchannels (NB). The verbal backchannels included “[ŋ~] (Non lexical verbal form)”, “[ne]”, “[ɑ]”, “[ɨm]” while the nonverbal backchannels involved head nodding. Fluency was assessed via three temporal measures: Rate A, Rate B and MLR. The data was statistically analyzed using SPSS 25 package. The results showed that 15 Chinese participants in the NV condition were more fluent than in the V+NV or NB conditions. However, no significant differences were found between the V+NV and NB conditions. These results suggest that nonverbal backchannels may facilitate the fluency of advanced Chinese learners of Korean during oral tasks depending on the nature of backchannel use in their L1 and sociocultural environments. The present research theoretically broadens the scope of both fluency and backchannel studies and provides valuable data and methods for empirical studies on backchannels to Korean.

Although motivation and fun are important for effective speech therapy, the conventional speech therapy is often conducted by using a textbook which can be boring to the speech-handicapped. The present study is to develop a speech therapy serious game for rehabilitation of the handicapped with articulation and fluency in speech. A speech therapy game was developed in the present study through the following four-step approach: (1) benchmarking analysis of 8 speech therapy systems, (2) analysis of 22 parents, (3) development of the framework of the speech therapy game and ideas for speech therapy game contents, and (4) implementation of the speech therapy serious game system using C# and the game engine Unity. The speech therapy serous game developed in the study can be of help for rehabilitation of articulation and fluency for the speech-handicapped.

This study aimed to examine English oral reading fluency of 5th and 6th grade students. Twenty three 5th graders and 22 6th graders at an elementary school in Daejeon participated in the study. Four texts were prepared: a 5th grade equivalent dialog text, a 5th grade equivalent narrative text, a 6th grade equivalent dialog text, and a 6th grade equivalent narrative text. The students were asked to read them aloud at the end of the first semester and the second semester. Comprehension check-up questions were given immediately after they read the texts. Their reading rate was measured in the number of words they read correctly per minute (WCPM). At the end of the school year, the 5th graders read their grade level dialog text at 103 WCPM on average, and the narrative text at 97 WCPM on average. The 6th graders read the dialog text 111 WCPM on average, and the narrative text at 99 WPCM on average. The correlations between reading rates and comprehension were moderate; .60 at the first administration and .58 at the second administration.

The purpose of present study was to explore the reading fluency of elemenatary school students in Korea. To achieve the purpose of this study, 150 sixth grade students were selected from two schools of Gyeonggi province and their reading fluency was evaluated. Assessment of reading fluency was administered as follows: students were asked to read orally a reading text for one minute, which was developed for this study and the teacher checked their reading performance according to assessment criteria developed by Zutell and Rasinski (1991). Reading fluency dealt with four subcategories: decoding accuracy, reading rate per a minute (WCPM), expression, and comprehension. Mean score at each subcategory and its aspect were analyzed, expression element were compared between the lower and higher group, and finally co-relation between reading fluency and comprehension were examined. The results showed that while most students gained higher score in decoding accuracy or reading rate, their expression was lower. Among four sub-categories of expression, i.e. expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and reading rate, score of expression and volume was the lowest. Most students read text with little expression or enthusiasm in their voice. On the basis of the result, some ideas for teaching fluency were suggested.

Since the introduction of the 6th National Curriculum, English pronunciation teaching in Korea has geared toward fluency, less focusing on accuracy. Since then the two technical terms, accuracy and fluency, have been widely used in the EFL literature in Korea, but in a rather confusing way. This paper is an endeavor to clarify these two concepts in terms of the viewpoints of Phonetics and English Education. From the phonetic standpoint, I argued that accuracy is more closely related to 'clear speech,' whereas fluency is applicable to either 'clear speech' or 'casual speech'. I also suggested two methods for the evaluation of English speaking fluency: one is the evaluation of weak form pronunciation: the other, sentence stresses. From a viewpoint of English Education, I reviewed some relevant literature and found that (1) accuracy and fluency are related to language usage and language use, respectively; (2) accuracy and fluency have been used as terms applicable to all four language skills in language learning, rather than speaking skill only: (3) a definition of fluency needs to be modified for its flexible use in ESL/EFL classroom setting; (4) a number of recent textbooks on pronunciation teaching include lots of useful fluency enhancing practices. As a conclusion, I summed up afore-mentioned discussions and presented some suggestions for the National Curriculum in the future.

Although fluency is included as one of main aspects to teach and assess in the course of "English Writing" for special-purposed high schools in Korea, any concrete and detailed idea has not been suggested in the guidelines to the course on how this concept could be understood and dealt with both in teaching and testing. This study, therefore, aims at exploring the concept of fluency in writing through both reviewing literature on fluency which is mainly with regard to speaking skills and investigating characteristics in terms of fluency which are observed from 390 writing samples written by 195 Korean students at a foreign language high school. As a result of inductive and qualitative analysis of the data, specific features were observed with regard to quantity, coherence, cohesion and language level. It is suggested that these features could be considered when we trying to understand fluency in depth and establish a rating scheme for it in the context of high school students" writing assessment.

Face-to-face interview has been used to elicit language samples in oral proficiency testing. The direct testing is believed to measure more authentic and interactive language ability. However, it is argued that speech samples from unstructured interviews are different from ones in natural communication settings, and that the interviewees are forced to play as passive roles. Furthermore, inexperienced interviewers often allow superficial fluency rewarded. Communicative task (e.g., long-run narrative and descriptive speech) meaningfulness tends to be underestimated. In the unstructured interview situations where intuition driven interviewers do not provide meaningful communicative tasks (or prompts), personality is implicitly focused, and interpersonal strategies are overestimated. When a test intends to assess ‘language’ skills, the nonlanguage skills make test usefulness dubious. This study explores inappropriateness issues of face-to-face English language proficiency interviews in Korea. This study also values the usefulness of semi-direct (tape- or computermediated) speaking tests in terms of task meaningfulness. Samples of superficial fluency collected in testing settings are commented upon. Points of view from Korean contexts are repetitively discussed over the study.

Serious inherent problems with practicality, intra-rater and inter-rater reliability overshadow the known positive washback effects of performance assessment in language education. In particular, it has been welldocumented that inter-rater reliability poses a serious threat to overall test validity, since individual raters necessarily measure performance according to their own subjective severity criteria in language proficiency. However, language testing has witnessed a remarkable series of breakthroughs in performance assessment during the recent advent of the information era. One such breakthrough utilizes state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology for oral proficiency interviews(OPI). Granting that current forms of ASR technologies may not produce results with the reliability needed to accommodate highstakes standardized test administration, they do offer aid in approaching the thorny issues of practicality and inherent human inter-rater subjectivity. Accordingly, this paper is intended to investigate the degree to which ASR-based OPI ratings match similar human-conducted OPI ratings by employing correlational analyses on the basis of degrees of rater severity. Furthermore, this paper attempts to explore a method of enhancing the robustness of ASR-based OPI ratings which capitalizes on suprasegmental information by measuring fluency based principally on the test-takers’ response time length.

본 연구에서는 수학 모바일 애플리케이션을 활용한 연산학습이 수학 학습부진아의 연산 유창성과 수학 학습동기에 미치는 영향을 알아보았다. 수학 유창성이란 수학적 질문에 빠르고 정확하게 대답하는 학생의 능력을 말한다. 초등학교 4학년에 재학 중인 수학 학습부진아동 24명을 대상으로 실험집단에는 수학 모바일 애플리케이션을 활용한 연산학습을, 비교집단에는 연산학습지를 활용한 연산학습을 실시하였다. 연구 결과 수학 모바일 애플리케이션을 활용한 연산학습은 수학 학습부진아의 연산유창성 향상에 긍정적인 영향을 미쳤다. 수학 유창성 면에서 수학 모바일 애플리케이션을 활용한 연산학습은 학습지를 활용한 연산학습보다 수학 유창성 향상에 더 효과적이었다. 또한 수학 모바일 애플리케이션을 활용한 연산학습은 수학 학습부진아의 수학 학습동기에도 긍정적인 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다.

‘이야기 구술하기’는 서사적 구조 속에 줄거리를 가지고 있고, 줄거리가 시간적 흐름에 따라 진행되며, 발화자는 청자의 반응을 고려하여 이야기를 재구성하여 전달하는 과정을 거치는 활동이므로, 한국어 말하기 수업에 이러한 이야기 구술하기 활동을 적용함으로써 말하는 속도, 억양 등 학습자의 말하기 능력이 자연스럽게 향상될 수 있을 것으로 기대하고 실험을 진행하였다. 실험 결과 ‘이야기 구술하기’를 말하기 활동으로 실시한 실험집단이 다른 말하기 활동을 실시한 통제집단보다 말하기 평가에서 정확성과 유창성 모두 더 높은 점수를 받았음을 알 수 있었다.