The Role of Theory in L2 Empirical Research on Language Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency

Abstract

This forum attempts to uncover the role played by theory in three empirical studies. To that end, in the sections that follow, I will begin with the review of literature on language complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Next, I will report on metric indices employed in the studies to measure the phenomenon of linguistic complexity and the results pertaining to grammatical and lexical complexity. Then I proceed with describing the status of theory in empirical research and the challenges research on CAF faces. The closing presents the discussion on how theory impacted the design of the empirical studies sampled for this paper.