The role of phonological awareness and memory in second language - Essay Example

The nature of cognitive constructs has not been a simple topic either in the field of applied linguistics, or in the pedagogy field of studies; nonetheless, a number of researches have shown that the levels of awareness and working memory were important in learning L2 as well as in first language (L1). The specific goals of this paper are to review the previous findings on these topics and to explore empirically crucial facts about them. To provide an accurate definition of "fluency" has not been an easy task for SLA researchers.

Theoretically, there are two approaches in defining "fluency": in a broader sense, fluency is a global oral proficiency, and in a narrower sense, fluency is considered as the component of oral proficiency that is purely a performance phenomenon (Lennon, 2000). In line with this, Kormos and Denes (2004) argued in their study of perception of fluency that there are high-order fluency, which can be equated with proficiency, and low-order fluency, which is represented by temporal aspects of fluency.

The current research takes the narrower perspective (i.e. low-order fluency), following Lennon's definition of fluency (2000: 26): "rapid, smooth, accurate, lucid and efficient translation of thought or communicative intention into language under the temporal constraints of online processing." In short, this is the capacity to use language in real time.Kormos and Denes (2004) proposed that fluency may not only be a temporal phenomenon: for some people, conceptualization of fluency might include grammatical precision and lexical diversity.

This finding highlights the fact that fluency is often discussed with the context of its complexity and accuracy. These three aspects of language presentation have been used to describe language learners' performance for the oral/written assessment and also to indicate their proficiency underlying their interpretation. Researchers have claimed that fluency, complexity and correctness are in competition with one another for attention resources (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005; Skehan, 1996). In other words, it is unlikely that a learner can achieve fluency, complexity and accuracy simultaneously since his/her attention and memory capabilities are limited.

For instance, in a study that compared fluency, complexity and accuracy, Skehan (1998) discussed that fluency is associated with meaning-based communication, which in turn is associated with lexicalization. Therefore, a learner's performance may be over-lexicalized if fluency is consistently prioritized. Skehan and Foster analyzed the influence of task structure and processing load on narrative performance and found that fluency has increased when the assignment performance was meaning-oriented: for example, when 1) tasks were on personal matters (1997), and 2) tasks contained comprehensible, inherent, sequential structure (1999).

In addition, the set of fluency measures generated no significant correlations between the proportions of form complexity and accuracy.In the field of SLA, the establishment of the appropriate standards of fluency has been a major concern.