Teaching Spoken Fluency in ELT

Teaching Spoken Fluency in ELT

• Most approaches to teaching speaking skills aim to engage learners in meaning-focused, communicative tasks.
• Debate exists on where communicative practice belongs in a teaching/learning cycle and how teachers can ensure attention is given to complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF).
• The trade-off hypothesis suggests that learners' limited cognitive resources lead them to give preferential attention to certain CAF components.
• Research shows that planning time prior to an oral production task leads to more fluent and accurate or complex language production, but not both.
• The type of planning provided and task complexity affect how learners allocate their attention to the three aspects of speaking.
• ELT curricula may overlook opportunities for learners to develop fluent control over language material, which is essential for higher skill performance.
• Developing fluency requires extensive and repetitive practice, which is often overlooked in ELT due to various reasons.
• Spoken fluency is likely to develop when activities are meaning-focused and within learners' previous experience, with support and encouragement for higher-level performance.
• The 4-3-2 activity meets all three conditions for fluency development and involves learners giving a short talk on a familiar topic three times consecutively, each time to a different partner, with the time reducing from four to three to two minutes on each occasion.
• An empirical study by De Jong and Perfetti (2011) found that the 4-3-2 activity improves fluency, and speech repetition in this task may cause changes in underlying cognitive mechanisms resulting in long-term and transferable effects on performance fluency.
• Curricula may underestimate the effort required to build fluency, and high stakes assessment may not give due weight to speaking.
• Communicative activities associated with fluency may be seen as impractical in large ELT classes, but research shows that fluency can be developed with meaning-focused activities that are within learners' previous experience and with support for higher-level performance.