Many areas of language learning and teaching are dichotomies: they come in pairs. Fluency is no exception to this phenomenon. Where you find ‘fluency’, you also find ‘accuracy.’

So, let’s start with the other partner in crime in this dichotomy: what exactly is accuracy? According to the British Council (Online) it is “how correct” learners use the “language system”, which includes “use of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary.” In short, it is producing language correctly.

So, if accuracy is being correct, then what is fluency?

The British Council doesn’t have an entry on its website www.teachingenglish.org.uk for fluency. In fact, picking up books by top methodologists in the field, such as Scrivener’s Learning Teaching and Harmer’s The Practice of English Language Teaching, it seems their tomes either completely lack an entry for ‘fluency’ or have a very vague reference to it.

When you look at the historical development of language teaching and learning, you will see that there has been a gradual shift from an accuracy-heavy approach to a more fluency-heavy one. This shift came about during the onset of the Communicative Approach.

As a consequence, fluency appears much later in language learning and teaching publications. It is also very often tied in with the Communicative Approach and is often not referred to as fluency per se but as ‘communication.’

The field of language learning and teaching used to assume that being an accurate speaker meant you were a good speaker: someone who could hold a conversation by uttering faultless sentences in terms of grammar, vocabulary and style.

Take a Communicative Approach

The Communicative Approach blew that out of the water when it pointed out the fact that native speakers are very far from accurate. For example: when you are writing an e-mail at work, don’t you find yourself misspelling words, editing and re-editing sentences and even deleting whole utterances? We do the same in speaking: we start a sentence and realise we have completely mucked it up and go back to the beginning to start again.

What about slips of the tongue? What about those Freudian moments when the barmaid asks to check how many pints you wanted for the round and you say “sex” instead of “six”?

That’s not to say accuracy isn’t important.

Indeed, accuracy is very important because the less accurate you are the less clear your message will be. Accuracy doesn’t play a huge role in simple messages, like with the customer below who is responding to the waiter’s questions:

W = waiter C = customer  W: Hello! How many? C: One. W: Excellent. Right this way please. Ok, here is the menu. Would you like something to drink? C: Water, please. W: Excellent. And what would you like to eat? C: The Greek salad, please. W: I’m afraid we don’t have any feta at the moment – will that be a problem? C: No problem. W: Excellent. So, that is one water and one Greek salad coming right up.

 

However, it would play a huge role if the customer had more to say, such as:

W: Hello! How many? C: Well at the moment just one, but I’m expecting a friend but she seems to be late at the moment. W: Excellent. Right this way please. Ok, here is the menu. Would you like something to drink? C: Well, I’ll take some water please, but make sure it’s not tap water but mineral water. Oh, and with some ice please. W: Excellent. And what would you like to eat? C: The Greek salad, please. W: I’m afraid we don’t have any feta at the moment – will that be a problem? C: Well, yes actually – feta basically makes it a Greek salad as opposed to a normal salad. Could you possibly substitute the feta for some halloumi? W: Absolutely sir. So, that is one water and one Greek salad with halloumi coming right up.

In order to express those more complex ideas, the customer needs to call on a lot of language knowledge and use it accurately, such as:

• Present Continuous as opposed to the Present Simple:

I’m expecting a friend

• Language for requesting something in a polite manner:

I’ll take some water please

Could you possibly substitute it for halloumi?

• Language for supposing and hypothesising:

She seems to be late.

• Appropriate vocabulary for the situation:

Mineral water, halloumi, Greek salad

Does it help to be accutate?

Although accuracy does help fluency, fluency is in itself a separate and independent entity in this dichotomy.

During his talk at Italy’s National TESOL Conference, Scott Thornbury highlights the fact that fluency is all about the ability to communicate the message. He recognises the importance of accuracy in communicating well but states that effective communication is fluent communication.

So, whether you communicate using the first conversation above (one word answers) or the second one (complex answers), it doesn’t matter because either way you are getting your message across clearly.

However, that still leaves one question unanswered:

How do you get your message across?

Learning to drive serves as a great analogy in answering this question. When you learn to drive, you tend to know a lot about road law, the mechanics of the car and how to operate the various devices in the car.

However, no matter how much knowledge you have about cars and driving, unless you get in the car and start driving you will never develop the skill of driving. That is because having the knowledge and putting it into practice are two different things.

In fact, in this analogy we can consider having the knowledge as the accuracy side of the equation and the ability to put that knowledge into effective use as the fluency side.

So, when you are learning to drive, how do you go about putting that knowledge into practice and becoming a good driver?

Practice.

You practise, practise and practise! That is what being fluent is all about – it’s about having the practice behind you so that when you find yourself in a situation you are able to call on your linguistic knowledge in flash and put it into effective use.

So, how do you get that practice?

Here are a couple of ideas:

• If it is spoken practice you are after, just getting the right sounds and words out of your mouth can be really difficult. Don’t be afraid to go home and speak to yourself. Stand in front of the mirror and practise saying individual words and then whole sentences.

• If it is written practice you are after, then try thinking about what things you write in your mother tongue (for example: e-mails, text messages and comments on social media) and then have a try at writing them in the language you are learning. Don’t go back to old e-mails, text messages and comments to try and write them again, because that is translation and that is a whole different kettle of fish – try just to writing some new ones.

• If you’ve got a friend who is learning the same language as you, meet up with them for a coffee or a drink and have a practice at speaking together. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make – this is all about getting the practice in.

• Understanding things you hear in the language you are learning is one thing, but trying to say them aloud yourself is another. Don’t be afraid to watch a film and pause it to try and repeat what you have just heard – this is good practice at speaking both fluently and accurately.

Do you have any ideas or tips for being fluent or becoming more fluent? Leave us a comment below!

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