earticle

영어

This article reports on an experimental study that investigated the effects of different conditions of listener backchannels on the fluency of L2 speakers. The participants were 15 advanced Chinese learners of Korean who performed oral tasks in three different backchannel conditions: (1) verbal + nonverbal (V+NV), (2) nonverbal-only (NV), and (3) no backchannels (NB). The verbal backchannels included “[ŋ~] (Non lexical verbal form)”, “[ne]”, “[ɑ]”, “[ɨm]” while the nonverbal backchannels involved head nodding. Fluency was assessed via three temporal measures: Rate A, Rate B and MLR. The data was statistically analyzed using SPSS 25 package. The results showed that 15 Chinese participants in the NV condition were more fluent than in the V+NV or NB conditions. However, no significant differences were found between the V+NV and NB conditions. These results suggest that nonverbal backchannels may facilitate the fluency of advanced Chinese learners of Korean during oral tasks depending on the nature of backchannel use in their L1 and sociocultural environments. The present research theoretically broadens the scope of both fluency and backchannel studies and provides valuable data and methods for empirical studies on backchannels to Korean.