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FLUENCY IN ELT
Alex Tamulis

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The 5th Skill

Fluency and Formulaic Language
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Alex Tamulis
 Alex Tamulis

FLUENCY IN ELT

Alex Tamulis

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Contents

Preface 4
Defining Fluency 6
Fluency in the ELT Classroom 13
Conversational Grammar 18
The Role of Choice in ELT 24
Encouraging Fluency 29
Conclusion 36
References 37

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Preface
This article contains the script, or the conference
speech of my 45-minute talk that was presented on
September 17th, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The
event (titled ELT Day II) took place at Disal
Botafogo and provided a setting for discussing recent
developments in ELT. The presenters who
participated in order of appearance were: Cecília
Nobre, Carina Fragozo, Alex Tamulis and Luiz
Otávio Barros.
The conference has been a great opportunity for all
speakers to bring their topics of interest to the table,
and to discuss them collectively in a panel format at
the end of the session. Presenters had a fantastic
opportunity to meet members of the audience, who
were very interested in the topics that were discussed
during the event. Ideas were presented in a lively
and accessible manner.
I would like to thank all participants for their
contributions. Many thanks to Macmillan Education

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and Disal Distribuidora, for all their unwavering

support and hospitality, which allowed presenters to
feel more at home.
I believe that conferences are unique in the sense that
they bring invaluable expertise from various
presenters from different backgrounds. They get
together to discuss ways to better serve learners and
to facilitate knowledge.
I hope this article equips you with better solutions for
global challenges on fostering an atmosphere that is
conducive to fluency and language development.
Motivating students and caring about the learning
environment is what keeps me going. Devising
solutions usually brings challenges to any setting,
and that is part of an inclusive environment, which
embraces critical thinking and positive dissent.

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1
Defining Fluency

What is fluency in the first place? Since the

definition of a fluent speaker may rub up against the
definition of what a proficient language user really is,
I´m going to try to briefly mention these two
concepts so we can establish a dichotomy and tackle
it accordingly.

Fluency is not easy to define. Some scholars

define it as an ability to use language accurately,
focusing on content rather than form per se
(Hartmann, 1976), filling time with talk, without
long pauses, using coherence and phrases that are
semantically dense (Fillmore, 1979). Creativity (to a
certain extent, since a lot of what we say is formulaic
in nature) and context-oriented opinions are always
important as well. Mind you that I´m more focused
on communicative fluency, on oral speech

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production, on spoken discourse in general. That´s

why we´re going to be covering lots of spoken
grammar topics and relevant formulaic language to
make communication more effective and more
speech-community like. I´ll return to my definition
of what a speech-community speaker means at a later
time in this lecture.

Fillmore cites 4 skills as key to being fluent:

speed and continuity, coherence, context-sensitivity
and creativity (guided by the “Pragmatic Tetrad of
Formulaic Sentences1”). In the Longman Dictionary
of Applied Linguistics, fluency is defined as features
and qualities, being able to sound natural and normal,
including native-like use of pausing, rhythm,
intonation, stress, rate of speaking, and use of
interjections and interruptions.

In order to avoid confusion, the Accredited

Language Services website defines certain levels of
fluency and proficiency. They say that the term

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native speaker is equal to that of “mother tongue,”

and it is generally safe to use these two terms
interchangeably.

If you speak language X since you were born,

you are a native speaker of “Xese”. It means that you
have used this language throughout your youth and
that´s the language you think when you concentrate
on doing something and running errands, before
going to bed, etc.

Upon reaching near-native speaker status, a

fluent speaker is very comfortable with producing
utterances and understanding everyday language, it
just happens to be that “Xese” is not their mother
tongue. If you really put your mind to it and want to
achieve this goal, albeit a very difficult one, it can
potentially be attained through extended study and,
usually, with time spent living in full linguistic
immersion.

Merriam-Webster defines the adjective

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“fluent” in reference to language as “capable of using

a language easily and accurately.” It’s important to
note that while a fluent speaker may be nearly
perfect, he may require more conscious concentration
when speaking and may not have the same
spontaneity as a native speaker when it comes to
idioms and similar terms and phrases. Turning back
to the dictionary, “proficient” is defined as “well
advanced in an occupation, art, or branch of
knowledge.” In terms of language, the “proficient”
label can therefore be seen as referring to a speaker
who, while very skilled in the use of a language, uses
the language with greater formality and less
familiarity than a native or fluent speaker.

Some other scholars use other terms to

define fluency, but it all ends up being linked to
effective and timely communication, oral
proficiency, automatic procedural skill, knowing how
to do something, and so on and so forth. Fluency, in
my opinion, is of paramount importance, more so

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than accuracy.

Fluent language doesn´t necessarily have to

be accurate: accurate language, especially written
grammar sentence production (in speaking contexts,
let´s say) doesn´t mean that one is fluent in a
language. Hence, accuracy is ancillary to fluency. It
can be seen as an important accessory to it. Fluent
language can be accurate language, as Brumfit
(1984) puts it. In my opinion, that shows that the
latter is a subset that intersects with the former at
certain times.

Fluency is related to how retrieval of data is

done in the brain. If a string is retrieved whole from
memory, they are usually produced with faster speed
and more confidence than completely fresh
sentences. It is real-time communication, filled with
timely pauses, hesitations and false starts, but we
usually know when to use certain strings that are not
interrupted by unfilled pauses, such as “I knew you

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were going to say that!”

We do a lot of “clause chaining” when we

talk, we usually focus on coordinate clauses and very
rarely rely on subordinate ones to get our points
across.

There are some avenues that we can take in

order to help our students become fluent; delving
into the components of effective communication and
understanding how fluency impacts it can help the
process tremendously. If we want our students to
stand a chance at improving their fluency status, we
have to go out of our way in terms of accuracy, and
shed light on communicative language tools that they
must be able to use, and strategies they must use to
compensate for the fact that, in most cases, they’re
not sages of the language, they are users of it.

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1
You can be creative provided you follow certain
pragmatic rules determined by the speech-
community you’re living in. You can use
institutionalized sentences, branch sentences, exotic
sentences or anomalous ones. Therefore, you can
have 4 types of sentences to choose from and your
creativity will depend on what type of sentence
you’re willing to use and it will fall under the
umbrella of one of those 4 categories described
above. Plese check out my article “The Bards of
Language: Reflections on Formulaic Sequences” to
find out more about it.

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2
Fluency in the ELT Classroom

In ELT classrooms, students are taught

reading, writing, listening and speaking, but these 4
skills are not enough, nor are they broadly defined.
Effective language users, whether NESTs or
NNESTs, have a much wider range of tools
available: pronunciation, conversational grammar,
and lexis (broadly defined). Yet we cannot forget
aspects of communication that are not spoken words
(paralinguistic features), the interpretation of body
motion communication (kinesic language features),
and the illocutionary force of an utterance (the
intention of the speaker in producing that utterance.

Pragmatics is directly related to the particular

contexts and social situations in which the language
is being used. It encompasses the ever so feeble
intersection between real world knowledge
(especially of speech-community conventions) and

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the language being used in a specific context. Thus,

the effective interlocutor communication in that
context would be an important aspect of pragmatics,
including issues like face-threatening acts, politeness
and cognitive empathy.

Let's have a look at pronunciation. We

usually focus on phonemes and leave prosodic
features and reduced forms aside, to the detriment of
real spoken English. Experts label these
suprasegmental features of English as stress,
intonation, and properties of syllables and larger
units of speech. Prosody is crucial for both
interlocutor identity and for a true sense of
community and commonality to be reached amongst
users, whilst not leaving out the own ‘self’ image of
the speaker.

Let’s consider the fact that an utterance like

"Hey, you look great today!" can be said in many
ways: you can sound as if you were bored, or convey

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the same message ironically, sarcastically, sexily and

probably in many other ways, depending on how
these prosodic features come into play at the time of
the utterance.

Another hotly debated topic that I wanted to

shed light on is ellipsis and connected speech:
elision, liaison, and so on and so forth. There are so
many subcategories that orbit these aspects that it
would take us forever to cover them all and I only
have 45 minutes today, but we could talk about
linking, assimilation, weak forms, metathesis,
epenthesis and many others. I really don’t agree with
people who say that slurred speech and the use of
contractions and reduced forms show signs of
careless or lazy English. There is ample evidence that
reduced forms are used in all kinds of “world
Englishes”, from Obama speeches to Snoop Dog rap
lyrics. Why is it that we do not teach
conversational grammar, then? Instead, many
teachers seem to prefer to cover coursebook written

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language and assume that students will automatically

be able to understand and produce the spoken
language that’s appropriate for the context. But
spoken English is a beast in its own right! Students
have a hard time separating sounds, puffs and hisses
into words because they haven’t been exposed to
situations that are conducive to that sort of learning.
Utterances like whatduyawannado? (What do you
want to do?) are tricky for non-native students during
a binge-watching session on Netflix because they’re
heard as one big pack of sounds and not as isolated,
neatly uttered words like the ones you hear on a
Class Audio CD.

Teachers are usually eager to teach minimal

pairs and phonemes in general. However, important
generalizations about real spoken English are
forgotten in the midst of such an approach to
teaching. A very important feature that cannot be
stressed enough (no pun intended!) is the fact that
unstressed vowels in English become the famous

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“schwa” (ə) in many environments, which makes it

the most common vowel in American English. There
are so many other important features that could be
potentially featured in this session, but if we
somehow start promoting this type of awareness it
will already be a huge leap for learners. Brazilian
students can also benefit a great deal, since they
often have trouble speaking English because it is
largely a stress-timed language, as opposed to
Portuguese, which is syllable-timed.

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3
Conversational Grammar

The relationship between grammar and ELT

teachers goes back a long way – and I’m afraid to say
that this potentially prescriptive perspective may
limit our students' options. I’m not saying that rules
are not important! I’m highlighting the fact that,
again, accuracy becomes the main actor of the play,
leaving other important stuff out of the limelight.

Let us consider the situation where students

have to use complete sentences when they speak,
which happens often in coursebook speaking
activities. Requiring such sentences may be useful in
teaching formal writing, albeit not appropriate for
teaching speaking, due to many reasons that were
already described above. That’s why I’ve mentioned
the “clause-chaining” process earlier, since they

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contribute heaps to spoken discourse. The truth is

that spoken discourse does not require complete
sentences, as it can be seen in most real-world
dialogues and social encounters. We do know that
the persistent use of complete sentences will sound
robotic and artificial. Let me give you a more
concrete example of that:

Teacher: Howzit goin?

Student: I am fine, thank you.

T: Your mom and dad?

S: They are doing very well, too, thank you.

T: Whereya going?

S: I am walking to the pub. Would you like

to come with me?

The “S” part of the dialogue would be

much more natural if the rules of conversational
grammar and pronunciation were applied, as follows:

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Teacher: Howzit goin'?

S: I’m good, thanks.

T: Your mom’n’dad?

S: They're good, too.

T: Whereya goin?

S: The pub. U wanna tag along?

It’s pretty clear that conversation #2 uses the

grammar of spoken colloquial English, which does
not impose the use of complete sentences, but rather
uses clauses, noun phrases and the like. On top of
that, several of those utterances appear to be chunks,
or formulaic strings of language (such as "Howzit
goin'?" and "I’m good, thanks."), which would
probably be better taught as sequences rather than as
sentences assembled on the basis of grammar rules.
There’s a plethora of prosodic features and sound
changes that could also be highlighted and practiced
here: haplology (the loss of a syllable in the middle

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of a word), lenition (weakening of sounds) and loss

of final segments, to name a few.

What about register and style?

Let’s look at these 2 topics first. Register is

all about differences in language choices based on
social and professional occupations, varied
upbringings or interest areas, etc. Being part of a
specific clique or niche involves the use of
specialized lexis, and may even include changes in
word combination and pronunciation. This is linked
to the idea of “shared knowledge/shared identity”,
and becomes an important remark in social
encounters.

Style is related to level of formality,

contrasts that range from very casual to very formal.
Differences in style are interesting for
sociolinguistics, as differences in geographical,
social, sexual, and psychological roles will indeed
affect differences in register. Yet, style can vary

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within any of these categories, since degrees of

personal relationship and other factors can also come
into play. A politician might be very formal during a
UN conference speech and suddenly change to a
more colloquial discourse upon greeting his staff
after a well-received speech. Thus, we can have
various styles within a politician’s register, or any
other occupation, for that matter.

Many students think that learning a word is a

univocal process, when we know for a fact that
words have many meanings. Teachers and students
alike are all terrified of lumbering the realm of
idioms, while that should and could be a blissful
promenade, provided you have the right opportunity
and some strategically laid out planning. Hence, C2
speakers must be truly at ease and master idioms of
their L2 language.

Teaching cursing and swearing in general is

usually a big no-no for ELT teachers. But they’re

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part of everyday language (Claire, 1990), and for

students to properly be able to use timely pauses and
hesitations while filling gaps, or showing people that
they’re happy or frustrated at things, they must
master that type of vocabulary as well. If mastering
is not in the plans, at least receptively understanding
their use in various contexts would already be a huge
step for them.

From now on, teaching grammar should include

teaching conversational grammar, as has been
pointed out by Thornbury on his blog (Topic 48, “F
is for Fluency”). The rules of utterances in spoken
discourse are crucial for smooth communication to
take place within any speech community. Adding
spoken features to speaking situations in ELT will
make classes more interesting and useful for
students.

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4
The Role of Choice in ELT

Widdowson (1978) cites reference rules as

the ones that make up the student’s knowledge of the
language (the “sage” aspect): grammar, vocab,
pronunciation, etc. He also mentions expression
rules, which are the rules that determine what the
student in fact does with the language. This is
somewhat parallel to Chomsky’s competence and
performance, in a way. These expression rules
wander the realm of pragmatic encounters, since
students have to be aware of settings and social
situations to make their choices wisely. So, instead of
asking if something is indeed right or wrong, one
should focus on what is more or less adequate for
that specific situation. Embracing diversity is about
looking for particularities instead of trying to make it
become a generalization, and while doing so, treating
it as just another iteration of the communicative

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process of societies in general.

Register and Style

The ability to switch registers and styles is

what is known as communicative competence. This
is akin to responding appropriately to contextual
pressures within the speech community you’re
immersed in. This should be one of the most
important things for students to master as they reach
more advanced levels, and have more freedom to
communicate, since their mental lexicon has
improved substantially since they first got in touch
with the language. Thus, instead of giving them one
usually appropriate language option for every
context, give them several options for several
contexts so they can begin to make their own
language choices. Spoken language is not black and
white; it’s actually those shades of grey in between
the main palettes that are going to be more important
for students to focus on, as they get more proficient,

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broadly speaking.

Speed

Fluency is not about speed; it is ok to speak

slowly, as long as the situation allows you to do so,
as long as you’re timing your pauses accordingly.
Many speech community speakers speak rather
slowly in order to have time to gather their thoughts
and reason about what they want to say. Hence, the
appropriate speed is the one at which speakers can
think clearly and still succeed in getting their
message across. Intelligibility comes first, followed
by fluency, and then followed by accuracy. This is
controversial, but it prioritizes communication over
language expertise.

Asking students to record themselves and

listen to the recording as a podcast later is a great
asset for them to notice when they’re pausing and
hesitating. Asking students to listen to other people’s
podcasts and asking them to keep a notebook for new

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lexical items and for observations of prosodic

features and pauses is also beneficial. They’ll notice
that most people hesitate and pause, and they do so
quite frequently; this adds to the “naturalness” of
common speech. But when is it done? How is it
done? The only way to start noticing these things is
to be aware that you have to look for them in the first
place and then organize your actions to highlight
them and study them accordingly. Most people do
not tolerate long silences.

The aid of fillers such as you know, ok, erm

and others gives people time to think and leaves
silence out of the equation. These fillers are always
formulaic strings, so they can be easily memorized
and retrieved whole from memory, as prefabricated
chunks of language. Communication is a two-way
street and cooperation between interlocutors is
mandatory. This includes “competent repairing”,
which means students have to be able to self-correct,
or understand “other-repair”, which means the other

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interlocutor jumps in and corrects them; this game is

played according to pragmatic rules, without hurting
one’s feelings, without threatening anyone’s face (I
mean, if successfully done). This shows that culture
oozes through language; it percolates it, adding one
more layer to our already convoluted linguistic map.

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5
Encouraging Fluency

We can foster fluency in the classroom

setting. We’re facilitators of learning, we provide
opportunities for people who are motivated to engage
in those opportunities and grow personally,
professionally and academically. However, we must
admit that facilitating fluency is different from
teaching other aspects of language. We must be
willing to let go of some of the control in our
classrooms; we then let the students have some of the
control and let them do some of the work, decreasing
our teacher-talking time. Thus, our main role is to set
up situations in which fluency can develop, and then
encourage students to actually communicate.

The thread of language is woven by fluency

and automaticity. There is some degree of
memorization involved in the process. One cannot

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say that retrieving patches of language is not related

to memory, and is only linked to grammar-generated
rules. We can come up with many examples of
situations where we’re not focusing on grammatical
aspects yet we’re using language fluently, such as
when uttering nursery rhymes, proverbs, maxims,
songs, etc. As Schmidt (1992) puts it, "Fluent speech
is automatic, not requiring much attention, and is
characterized by the fact that the psycholinguistic
processes of speech planning and speech production
are functioning easily and efficiently." The truth of
the matter is that defining what easily and efficiently
means seems to be the million-dollar issue here.
Making general claims won’t help us pen decidable
proofs here; that’s why contextual information is so
important to the matter. This is the reason why
pragmatics and sociolinguistics should be given more
importance in overall linguistic research in applied
linguistics, in my honest opinion.

This woven fabric can only occur if students

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are articulating phonemes and if their brains

understand the phonological rules of English. I
usually tell my students that it is ok to mix L1 and L2
phonology since the bilingual brain stores languages
in a very “maze-like” way, blurring their boundaries
and not bringing them up linearly. We all have our
“old” memories, the ones that are carved in out
brains and therefore need to be replaced by a “new”
one; such view is akin to phonological awareness,
since new rules have to be digested in order for new
sounds and articulations to be fully understood by
that person. The mere production of a vowel won’t
make the brain aware of how that vowel is placed in
the chain of sounds that are available to the system,
that is, how that vowel interacts with other vowels in
order for meanings to be established and contrasted
within that language.

“I need to speak English, therefore I need to

use accurate grammar”

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Producing accurate grammar won’t

necessarily take you too far on the road to fluent
spoken discourse. In doing so, you could even hinder
your chance of becoming fluent. Don’t fall into the
trap of memorizing tables of rules just because you
have to know them by heart; this is not conducive to
a real world atmosphere of learning.

Students are afraid of making mistakes

because they do not want to have their “face”
threatened, that means, they don’t want to feel
embarrassed in front of the classroom. The thing is,
everyone is prone to “mistakes”, but what are them
anyway? I don’t want to sound skeptical, but like
I’ve said before, mistakes should be dealt with on a
case-by-case basis.

Brown (1996) mentions that one key to

encouraging students to make constructive errors is
to explain native speaker error patterns, which
involves a few steps. First, he tells students that

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native speakers of English make errors in

pronunciation, word choice, grammar, even logic.
Second, since learners may not be attentive observers
to recognize that native speakers do make errors, he
illustrates that fact by pointing out errors in his own
speech or in podcasts of other native speakers.

Error correction

If students remain unwilling to make

mistakes, they will probably never be able to become
fluent; sometimes they need to focus on accuracy,
but other times they have to relax and practice the
automaticity that is necessary for fluency to take
place. Another key to encouraging students to
make constructive errors is to minimize error
correction in students’ oral production, and Luiz
Otávio Barros 2 has great insights on how teachers
should tackle it in the classroom. Teachers have to be
aware of length turns, since students shouldn’t be
interrupted in the middle of their train of thought,

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especially if it’s a long one. Teachers have to keep

their eyes peeled for errors that have a higher chance
of “resurfacing”, and Barros coins the term
“resurfaceability”, which basically means that the
more likely a structure is to resurface in students’
oral production, the higher the chance a teacher will
worry about it and treat it accordingly (that is, using
the right strategy to correct it).

For teachers to seriously foster fluency, they

absolutely must limit error correction to those errors
that hinder communication, but that has to be done
via certain steps and strategies that have to be part of
the whole teaching process. In a sense, the student's
responsibility in fluency development is to bring the
level of their spoken English production up to the
level of their knowledge of lexicogrammar (a
mixture of words and rules, such as storage in the
mental lexicon and rules to generate new utterances,
as Pinker puts it). Brumfit (1984, p. 57) states that
"Fluency, then, can be seen as the maximally

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effective operation of the language system so far

acquired by the student". During periods of student
talk, teachers should avoid to harken back to the
good ole focus on accuracy (which is what happens if
they do on-the-spot correction) because that might
add an unnecessary predicament to fluency
development.

As Brown (1996) beautifully puts it: "A

student who is afraid to make errors won't make
errors, and a student who won't make errors won't
become fluent. For many students, this may mean
learning to take chances in ways that they have never
done before."

2
Check out www.luizotaviobarros.com for more
info on his lecture on oral correction

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Conclusion

Treating fluency as a 5th skill (on top of reading,

writing, listening and speaking) will help students
understand that it is indeed a matter of degrees. You
climb a flight of stairs; you get to the first floor first,
then to the second floor, and so on and so forth. You
use finite means (your feet) to climb an infinite
amount of stairs. Students can use finite means (units
of language, either phonemes or morphemes) to
create infinite sentences in a language. That has to be
done via a strategic approach, though. Providing
students with the appropriate tools, devising
activities that promote memorization of word groups
and fostering an atmosphere that is conducive to
learning goes a long way in the development of
fluent speech production.

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Book cover designed by me – Image taken from

www.freeimages.com, free of copyright

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