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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Scott Windeatt
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Fluency is usually defined in relation to temporal features such as speed of delivery and pauses, and such features are generally the focus of research on fluency. The reasons why pauses occur, however, have received much less attention. This study first explores the distribution and location of pauses in short academic presentations given by students as part of an EAP course at an Australian university. This data is then used to investigate the reasons for a sample of those pauses, using the researchers’ interpretations, followed by student explanations in stimulated recall interviews (SRIs). The main findings provide confirmation that the location and the reasons for those pauses which are likely to affect the fluency of the presentations are a result not only of linguistic and cognitive issues, but also of psychological factors. The results underline the importance of taking all of these factors into account in EAP programmes by encouraging student awareness of their pausing behaviour, its causes, the effect on their audience, and of strategies for dealing with psycholinguistic, as well as linguistic and cognitive issues. The results confirm the value of SRI as a technique in exploring assumptions about the reasons for pauses, and the limitation of focusing solely on statistical analyses of pausing phenomena.
Author(s): Chang H, Windeatt S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Language Teaching Research
Year: 2024
Pages: Epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 26/02/2024
Acceptance date: 03/02/2024
Date deposited: 03/06/2026
ISSN (print): 1362-1688
ISSN (electronic): 1477-0954
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688241233718
DOI: 10.1177/13621688241233718
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