8

What is fluency and how do you teach it?

Fluency is one of those elusive, fuzzy, highly contested words that means different things to
different people. In lay terms, a ‘fluent speaker of French’ is probably someone whose French
is judged as correct (albeit accented), intelligible, idiomatic and – if not fast – at least not
halting. In other words, it flows.

Traditionally, methodology writers have tended to follow suit. Thus, Donn Byrne, in Teaching
Oral English (1976: 9), defines fluency as ‘the ability to express oneself intelligibly, reasonably
accurately and without undue hesitation’. However, the advent of the communicative approach
witnessed a radical reframing of the notion of fluency, where fluency, far from incorporating
accuracy, was in fact viewed in sharp contrast to it. Thus, the Teacher’s Book for Headway
Intermediate (Soars and Soars 1986: iv), in a section headed ‘Accuracy versus fluency’,
identifies accuracy work as presentation and controlled practice, while defining fluency work as
‘consist[ing] of the performance of real, or realistic, tasks which require language’. This is
consistent with Brumfit’s (1984: 56) view that ‘fluency … is to be regarded as natural language
use, whether or not it results in native-speaker-like language comprehension or production.’ And
he adds that ‘the distinction between accuracy and fluency is essentially a methodological
distinction, rather than one in psychology or linguistics’ (1984: 52).

The problem with this definition, though, is that it is very difficult to put into practice, especially
from the point of view of testing. What exactly is ‘natural language use’, how do you contrive it
in the classroom, and how do you assess it (especially if you reject native-speaker-like models
as your benchmark)? As a term, fluency becomes difficult to disentangle from related concepts,
such as intelligibility, coherence, communicative effectiveness, and so on.
Moreover, the separation – even polarization – of accuracy and fluency may have misled us into
thinking that they are mutually exclusive, each demanding different kinds of task design and
teaching interventions, such as whether to correct errors or not. It is a dichotomy that has
generated a great deal of debate on how best to sequence accuracy and fluency activities, and
how to achieve the optimum balance between them. But what if accuracy and fluency cannot be
so easily unravelled? What if they are interdependent? Where does that leave our
methodology?

To counter this fuzziness, various researchers, working in a cognitive tradition, have attempted
to characterize fluency in measurable terms. Thus, Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005: 139) define
fluency as ‘the production of language in real time without undue pausing or hesitation’. That is
to say, it is a ‘temporal phenomenon’. Well and good. This, at least, is something we can
measure. Accordingly, researchers have identified a number of objective measures of fluency,
such as speech rate (e.g. syllables per minute), number and length of pauses, length of runs,
and so on, and, while there is still disagreement as to which of these are the most reliable
indicators of fluency, we are now much better equipped to test it.

To test it, but not necessarily to teach it. These objective measures are, after all, only the
surface features of fluency, and do not tell us a lot about the cognitive and social processes
that underpin it. You can’t teach learners how not to pause, unless you know why they are
pausing in the first place.

So, what do the experts say? Confusingly, Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005: 139) revert to the old
communicative argument, claiming that ‘fluency occurs when learners prioritize meaning over
form in order to get a task done’. But does getting a task done really correlate with ‘undue
pausing or hesitation’? Not necessarily, since the effort involved in performing a task may
actually increase the degree of dysfluency. Nor does pause-free production necessarily indicate
that meaning is being prioritized. Some of our most fluent productions, as proficient speakers,
are texts that we have committed to memory (tongue twisters, nursery rhymes, prayers, oaths
of allegiance, etc.): texts that we can trot out with zero attention to meaning.

In fact, it may be that fluency is – in the end – simply a function of memory, and that the
capacity to produce pause-free speech in real time is contingent on having a memorized bank
of formulaic language, or ‘chunks’. As Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992: 32) argued, ‘It is our
ability to use lexical phrases … that helps us speak with fluency’ – a view that is a core
principle of the Lexical Approach (Lewis 1993) but which in fact long pre-dates it. As far back
as 1925, Harold Palmer (1925, 1999: 185) identified ‘the fundamental guiding principle for the
student of conversation’ as being ‘memorize perfectly the largest number of common and
useful word groups!’

Palmer’s advice seems particularly prescient, given that he lacked the technological means –
such as access to computerized corpora – to test this intuition. Nevertheless, the relationship
between memory, formulaic language and fluency has stood the test of time, and although no
one is saying that fluency is solely an effect of having access to a mental phrasebook, there is
general agreement that, as Segalowitz (2010: 126) puts it, ‘the ability to correctly use formulaic
sequences contributes to the native-like naturalness of speech, and to modulating the message-
processing load to make communication easier and more efficient. L2 speakers lacking
appropriate control of formulaic sequences will not be able to enjoy the efficiency advantages
that can accrue from using such sequences, and this can create processing burdens for them
that might compromise fluency.’

In the interests of fluency development, how might we now apply Palmer’s injunction to
‘memorize perfectly the largest number of common and useful word groups’? We might need
to:

1. clarify the concept of what a ‘word group’ is

2. select those word groups that are both common and useful

3. set a target that represents the largest practicable number

4. decide what the criteria for ‘perfect memorization’ might be

5. devise and teach strategies that promote memorization of word groups

6. devise activities that provide opportunities for learners to activate what they have
memorized, without undue pausing or hesitation, in ways that replicate real language use.

Questions for discussion

1. When you use the word ‘fluent’ to describe a second language speaker, what do you
understand by this?

2. How does (grammatical, lexical, phonological) accuracy contribute to fluency? How might it
inhibit fluency?
3. Is there any sense in labelling some classroom activities as accuracy activities, and others
as fluency activities? Would form-focused activities and meaning-focused activities make any
more sense?

4. Is it worth continuing the search for the measurable attributes of fluency (such as pause
length, etc.)? What practical use might such research have for teachers?

5. To what extent is ‘fluency in the eye (or ear) of the beholder’? That is to say, isn’t it partly, at
least, the overall impression a speaker makes, rather than a purely (psycho-) linguistic
phenomenon? In which case, are there any shortcuts to creating this impression?

6. What do you understand by word group, chunk, lexical phrase or formulaic language? Are
the terms synonymous? Can you give examples?

7. ‘Select the word groups that are both common and useful.’ How would you go about doing
this?

8. ‘Devise activities that provide opportunities for learners to activate what they have
memorized …’ Again, what kind of activities might these be?

References
Brumfit, C.J. (1984) Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching: The Roles of
Fluency and Accuracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Byrne, D. (1976) Teaching Oral English, London: Longman.

Ellis, R. and Barkhuizen, G. (2005) Analyzing Learner Language, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach: The State of ELT and a Way Forward, Hove:
Language Teaching Publications.

Nattinger, J.R. and DeCarrico, J.S. (1992) Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Segalowitz, N. (2010) Cognitive Bases for Second Language Fluency, London: Routledge.

Palmer, H. (1925, 1999) ‘Conversation: The fundamental guiding principle for the student of
conversation’, in Smith, R.C. (1999) The Writings of Harold E. Palmer: An Overview, Tokyo:
Hon-no-Tomosha.
Soars, J. and Soars, L. (1986) Headway Intermediate Teacher’s Book, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/f-is-for-fluency/