Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency in Second Language Acquisition

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INTRODUCTION

This special issue addresses a general question that is at the heart of much research in applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA): what makes a second or foreign language (L2) user, or a native speaker for that matter, a more or less proficient language user?

Many researchers and language practitioners believe that the constructs of L2 performance and L2 proficiency are multi-componential in nature, and that their principal dimensions can be adequately, and comprehensively, captured by the notions of complexity, accuracy and fluency (Skehan 1998; Ellis 2003, 2008; Ellis and Barkhuizen 2005). As such, complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) have figured as major research variables in applied linguistic research. CAF have been used both as performance descriptors for the oral and written assessment of language learners as well as indicators of learners’ proficiency underlying their performance; they have also been used for measuring progress in language learning.

A review of the literature suggests that the origins of this triad lie in research on L2 pedagogy where in the 1980s a distinction was made between fluent versus accurate L2 usage to investigate the development of oral L2 proficiency in classroom contexts. One of the first to use this dichotomy was Brumfit (1984), who distinguished between fluency-oriented activities, which foster spontaneous oral L2 production, and accuracy-oriented activities, which focus on linguistic form and on the controlled production of grammatically correct linguistic structures in the L2 (cf. also Hammerly 1991).