Quantitative Assessment of Oral Fluency in Chinese as a Second Language: An Empirical Study on Expressive and Cognitive Dimensions

The assessment of oral fluency in learners of Chinese as a second language (L2) is a key topic in second language teaching and testing. This study developed a measurement framework for Chinese oral fluency based on objective and quantifiable indicators and empirically examined its reliability and validity. Thirty intermediate-to-advanced international students learning Chinese participated in a computer-based test (CBT), which assessed oral fluency from two dimensions: expressive fluency and cognitive fluency. Participants completed three tasks: picture-based storytelling (oral output), sentence construction (lexical retrieval), and category judgment (attentional control). Six core fluency indicators were extracted, including speech rate, mean length of runs, and articulation rate (expressive fluency), as well as sentence construction response time, coefficient of variation in response time, and attention-shifting cost (cognitive fluency). Results showed that the expressive fluency indicators demonstrated high internal consistency and were significantly correlated with participants’ oral proficiency scores. Although the overall reliability of cognitive fluency indicators was relatively low, the response time in the sentence construction task showed a significant correlation with oral proficiency. Regression analyses further indicated that expressive fluency indicators significantly predicted oral scores, whereas the predictive power of cognitive fluency indicators was limited. These findings support the feasibility of using objective quantitative indicators to assess L2 Chinese oral fluency and reveal some of the limitations of such approaches. The study provides empirical evidence for the objectification of Chinese oral testing and offers pedagogical insights for enhancing L2 oral fluency instruction and assessment systems.