This monograph presents analyses of filled and unfilled pauses, cut-offs, repair, discourse markers and other phenomena often referred to as disfluencies in the context of advanced language learners' PowerPoint presentations. It adopts a multimodal perspective to demonstrate the functions of these elements in interaction. Paired with gaze shifts, pointing gestures and posture shifts, they act as facilitators of joint visual orientation, mutual understanding, and accountable actions. Therefore, this volume suggests the name cofluency to reflect their potential functionality. Cofluencies are essential elements of multimodal chunks and multimodal patterns, and these are building blocks of a multimodal turn-taking mechanism for presentations. These concepts are illustrated and discussed based on excerpts from naturally occurring classroom data.

Fluency and disfluency are characteristic of online language production and may be signalled by markers such as filled and unfilled pauses, discourse markers, repeats or self-repairs, which can be said to reflect ongoing mechanisms of processing and monitoring. The Fluency & Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties conference held at the University of Louvain in February 2017 marked the closing of a five-year research project dedicated to the multimodal and contrastive investigation of fluency and disfluency in (L1 and L2) English, French and French Belgian sign language, with a focus on variation according to language, speaker and genre. The closing conference was intended as an opportunity to further expand the range of languages, language varieties and genres studied from the (dis)fluency perspective. The selection of papers in this volume re ects the diversity of approaches aiming to uncover the ways in which fluency and disfluency are conceived in language production and comprehension and how they are signalled. Topics include methodological challenges in cross-linguistic (dis)fluency research, the role of contextual features in professional and non-professional settings, and the characteristics of fluency and disfluency in second language speech. Of particular importance in all contributions is the ambivalent role of pauses, discourse markers, repeats and other markers, which can be both a symptom of encoding difficulties and a sign that the speaker is trying to help the hearer decode the message. They should thus be interpreted in context to identify their contribution to fluency and/or disfluency, which can be viewed as two sides of the same coin.

First Published in 2000. In everyday life, 'pragmatic' means 'useful', 'functional' or 'what's right for just now'. In communication, it means just the same. This book has been written for teachers and speech and language therapists (SLTs) working in services for children who have difficulty communicating usefully.

Strategies for successful classroom management have been readily available to practitioners for at least half a century. However, despite the vast body of knowledge available, there appears to be a great deal of scope for further research in terms of developing a more detailed understanding of the interactional details of classroom management practices. Drawing on a corpus of 58 hours of video and audio recordings in English as a Foreign Language classrooms in Germany, the book provides a micro-analytical perspective of foreign language classroom management. It contributes to the body of current research by focusing on how foreign language teachers respond to pupils’ classroom norm violations using interrogative constructions (i.e. interrogative reproaches). Through a Conversation Analytic investigation of these social actions, the paper provides valuable insights into the details of the in-situ production of classroom management strategies and their underlying interactional mechanisms.

Second language (L2) fluency is an exciting and fast-moving field of research, with clear practical applications in language teaching. This book provides a lively overview of the current advances in the field of L2 fluency, and connects the theory to practice, presenting a hands-on approach to using fluency research across a range of different language-related professions. The authors introduce an innovative multidisciplinary perspective, which brings together research into cognitive and social factors, to understand fluency as a dynamic variable in language performance, connecting learner-internal factors such as speech processing and automaticity, to external factors such as task demands, language testing, and pragmatic interactional demands in communication. Bringing a much-needed multidisciplinary and novel approach to understanding the complex nature of L2 speech fluency, this book provides researchers, students and language professionals with both the theoretical insights and practical tools required to understand and research how fluency in a second language develops.

This book takes a new and holistic approach to fluency in English speech and differentiates between productive, perceptive, and nonverbal fluency. The in-depth corpus-based description of productive fluency points out major differences of how fluency is established in native and nonnative speech. It also reveals areas in which even highly advanced learners of English still deviate strongly from the native target norm and in which they have already approximated to it. Based on these findings, selected learners are subjected to native speakers' ratings of seven perceptive fluency variables in order to test which variables are most responsible for a perception of oral proficiency on the sides of the listeners. Finally, language-pedagogical implications derived from these findings for the improvement of fluency in learner language are presented. This book is conceptually and methodologically relevant for corpus-linguistics, learner corpus research and foreign language teaching and learning.