The Relationship Between Language Aptitude And Fluency Of L2Speech Production

Many scholars, like Skehan&Bialystok, all point out that language aptitude is oneof the best tools predicting second language learning success. Carroll draws aconclusion from his years of research that the correlation coefficients for aptitude andlanguage proficiency fluctuate between0.4-0.6. The modern language aptitude testdesigned by Carroll was once used by U.S. foreign affairs agency to select peopleaccepting English training program. At present, the MLAT is still widely used inAmerica and Canada.Although the conclusion has been reached on the importance of language aptitudeon second language acquisition in the academic, yet at home, scholars in foreigneducation do not pay enough attention to the study on it. In China, since1988, in theCollege Entrance Examination, language aptitude test was cancelled for the enrollmentof English major. The phenomenon of dumb English in public English is attributed tothe absence of training. There is little research on the influencing mechanism oflanguage aptitude on various productive language skills. Especially, less research isconducted to explore whether oral English fluency, as one of the most important marksof language production is affected by language aptitude. Therefore, the present studyaims to study oral English fluency from the perspective of language aptitude. Researchquestions are as following:1. What are the differences in overall language aptitude and its components amongthe learners?2. What is the relationship between language aptitude components and indices oforal English fluency?According to the research questions, the study is conducted on50English majorfreshmen of Jianghuai College of Anhui University.41students are chosen according tothe results of the questionnaire. The whole experiment includes a questionnaire, amodern language aptitude test and an oral English test. Adobe Audition1.5and SPSS3.0are used to collect and analyze the data. The findings show that students differ significantly in language aptitude. There is astrong correlation between overall language aptitude and oral English fluency. In termsof time indices, Students with higher language aptitude articulate more per minute, havea longer mean length of run and pause less. In terms of linguistic and performingindices, they pronounce more accurately and repair less frequently. Oral production isan information process. In this process, phonetic encoding ability is related to inputprocessing. Grammatical and inductive learning ability function positively in theunderstanding process. Rote memory makes it easy for learners to retrieve information.That explains why there is a strong correlation between overall language aptitude andoral English fluency.There also exists individual difference in the components of language aptitudeunder the same aptitude level, which has an effect on oral fluency. Students with strongphonemic encoding abilities have good oral fluency even if their grammatical andinductive abilities are low. The reason is that phonetic encoding ability featuresprominently in input process and directly affects oral fluency. It is also found thatgrammatical and inductive learning abilities do not play a direct role in oral production.In addition, rote memory is found to have a close relationship with oral fluency.Finally, the research points out that fluency of L2speech is a complexphenomenon and foreign language aptitude is facilitative to the acquisition of oralEnglish. The researcher hopes that the present study will arouse colleges’ anduniversities’ awareness towards language aptitude. They should make different teachingprograms according to their language aptitude differences to promote second languageacquisition.