Improve Speaking Fluency
System, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 377-384,1989 Printed in Great Britain
0346-251X/89 $3.00 + 0.00 0 1990 Pergamon Press plc
IMPROVING SPEAKING FLUENCY
PAUL NATION
English Language Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand This paper examines the improvement of learners of English during the performance of a speaking activity which involves repeating the same unrehearsed talk. Improvements in fluency, grammatical accuracy, and control of the content showed that during the short time spent doing the activity, learners performed at a level above their normal level of performance. It is argued that working at this higher than usual performance is a way of bringing about long-term improvement in fluency.
Speaking activities in the language classroom can have a variety of goals. These include the following. 1. The learning of content matter. 2. The learning of language items from other participants. 3. The development of fluency. 4. Learning communication strategies. 5. Developing skill in discourse. This paper looks at the development of fluency, in particular at a technique called the 4/3/2 technique. Fillmore’s (1979) first kind of fluency is “the ability to fill time with talk . . . a person who is fluent in this way does not have to stop many times to think of what to say next or how to phrase it”. As Fillmore goes on to show, this fluency will depend on a range of factors including having quick access to and practised control of many of the language’s lexical and syntactic devices, being able to decide readily when it is appropriate and efficient to use them, as well as having familiarity with interactional and discourse schemata. Brumfit (1984) sees fluency “as the maximally effective operation of the language system so far acquired by the student”. These definitions suggest that fluency can be measured by looking at (1) the speed and flow of language production, (2) the degree of control of language items, and (3) the way language and
0346-251X/89 $3.00 + 0.00 0 1990 Pergamon Press plc
IMPROVING SPEAKING FLUENCY
PAUL NATION
English Language Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand This paper examines the improvement of learners of English during the performance of a speaking activity which involves repeating the same unrehearsed talk. Improvements in fluency, grammatical accuracy, and control of the content showed that during the short time spent doing the activity, learners performed at a level above their normal level of performance. It is argued that working at this higher than usual performance is a way of bringing about long-term improvement in fluency.
Speaking activities in the language classroom can have a variety of goals. These include the following. 1. The learning of content matter. 2. The learning of language items from other participants. 3. The development of fluency. 4. Learning communication strategies. 5. Developing skill in discourse. This paper looks at the development of fluency, in particular at a technique called the 4/3/2 technique. Fillmore’s (1979) first kind of fluency is “the ability to fill time with talk . . . a person who is fluent in this way does not have to stop many times to think of what to say next or how to phrase it”. As Fillmore goes on to show, this fluency will depend on a range of factors including having quick access to and practised control of many of the language’s lexical and syntactic devices, being able to decide readily when it is appropriate and efficient to use them, as well as having familiarity with interactional and discourse schemata. Brumfit (1984) sees fluency “as the maximally effective operation of the language system so far acquired by the student”. These definitions suggest that fluency can be measured by looking at (1) the speed and flow of language production, (2) the degree of control of language items, and (3) the way language and
References: ALLWRIGHT, R. (1979) Language learning through communication practice. In Brumfit, C. J. and Johnson, K. (eds), The Communicative Approach to Lunguuge Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. BRUMFIT, C. (1984) Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CANALE, M. (1983) From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. In Richards, J. C. and Schmidt, R. W. Language and Communication. New York: Longman. FILLMORE, C. J. (1979) On fluency. In Fillmore, C. J., Kempler, D., and Wang, W. S.-J. (eds), Individual Differences in Languuge Ability and Lunguuge Behavior. New York: Academic Press. MAURICE, K. (1983) The fluency workshop. TESOL Newsletter 17, p. 429. SWAIN, M. (1985) Communicative competence: some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In Gass, S. M. and Madden, C. G. (eds), Input in Second Language Acquisition. Massachusetts: Newbury House.