The development of fluency, complexity and accuracy in the written production of L2 French

Abstract : The present longitudinal case study investigated the development of fluency, complexity and accuracy – and the possible relationships between them – inthe written production of L2 French. We assessed fluency and complexityin five intermediate learners by means of conventional indicators for writtenL2 (cf. Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998), while accuracy was measured on the basisof four morphosyntactic features, namely subject-verb agreement, past tense, negation and clitic object pronouns. Results revealed major individual differences and showed that fluency, complexity and accuracy follow separate developmental trajectories. Data for the morphosyntactic features pointed to a relationship between fluency and accuracy. However, the nature of this relationship seemed to vary according to the structural complexity of these features. Fluency and syntactic complexity did not appear to be related. These findings shed new light on the concepts of complexity and accuracy.