Fluency as a Marker of Speaking Skills in Bangladesh: Blind Language Proficiency Evaluations

Fluency is one of the most overt signs that convey to hearers the language proficiency of the speaker. Typically, a proficient English speaker is also fluent, and so their fluency signals their mastery of the language. Additional speaking skills indicators are accuracy and range of vocabulary. This study aims to identify and explore to what extent the common people in Bangladesh – largely considered to be an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) country – value fluency when evaluating someone’s language proficiency. To that end, the researcher created various types of audio clips – each with different levels of fluency, accuracy, vocabulary, and accent – and asked a demographically diverse group of Bangladeshi people – school, college, undergraduate, postgraduate students, adult males, and females – to judge the English proficiency of all the speakers behind the audio clips. Findings revealed that fluency was the most significant marker of the ratings, accent being a close second, followed by grammaticality and, last and least, complexity. Secondly, the adult participants tended to rate holistically while the younger generation, especially university students, discretely analyzed the speech samples. This study implies that the general people of Bangladesh should focus more on language features they can improve in – in particular, fluency – rather than something they most probably cannot – adopting a so-called standard accent. Keywords: fluency; accuracy, vocabulary, accent, pronunciation, perceived language proficiency