Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia

T. Muller, J. Adamson, P. Brown, S. Herder, T. Muller, J. Adamson, P. Brown, S. Herder

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137449405
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

In EFL contexts, an absence of chances to develop fluency in the language classroom can lead to marked limitations in English proficiency. This volume explores fluency development from a number of different perspectives, investigating measurements and classroom strategies for promoting its development.

Part I

Fluency in the Curriculum

As editors, we decided to front the chapters in Part I from a perspective of integrating fluency into the whole language learning curriculum. While we recognize the four skills as important to language learning, it is the rare encounter with language that involves only speaking or only reading; fluent users of language are those who are not only able to speak, write, read, and listen to the language, but can also move seamlessly from one medium to another, explaining an email to a colleague, for example, or summarizing the points from a conference call into meeting minutes. While mastery of discrete language skills may be a prerequisite to fluent language use, we felt it important to start Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia by considering how teachers can promote development of fluent language skills from a broad perspective.

Paul Nation begins by reviewing his four-strands concept and sharing what he feels is important about one of those strands, fluency. He covers some of the findings of current research into the teaching of language fluency, suggests practical classroom activities to promote fluency development in the language classroom, and finishes by suggesting future potential directions for language learning fluency research.

Following Nation, Steven Herder and Gregory Sholdt examine the teaching of TOEFL iBT test preparation in the language classroom, and specifically how Herder integrates fluency practice for the various parts of the test, having students work simultaneously to improve their speaking, reading, and writing skills in anticipation of spending a year studying outside Japan. Herder explains how the teaching strategy involved not only instruction in discrete language skills, but also informing students about the kinds of language skills important to success and the purpose of the different activities they engaged in. Herder and Sholdt finish the chapter by describing how they plan to go on to expand classroom fluency research from one classroom to a number of classroom contexts and a number of different teachers, to further investigate the effectiveness of fluency training in the classroom.

Tim Murphey builds on the affective concepts discussed in Herder, exploring the psychological underpinnings of human motivation to try new things and to succeed. He also explains how the handling of English as a topic of study, rather than as a means for communicating with peers, is at least partially to blame for students’ aversion to English in Japan. He describes how scaffolding participation and agency in a friendly class atmosphere leads to the cultivation of fluency among language learners. Murphey shares how this was realized in two very different classroom contexts, in Japan and in Hawaii.

Next, Andrew Finch examines fluency from a curriculum innovation perspective, explaining how he approached the integration of language fluency into the curriculum at two Korean universities. He addresses how it was important to get the teachers on the programs to understand and support the goals of the new curriculum, and shares how, while this did not happen overnight, after some time with the new teaching system, teachers were convinced of its efficacy; and anecdotal evidence showed that students were more willing to use English both in and out of class.

Completing this part of the book, Jason Peppard shares the design and testing of a functional lexicogrammatical syllabus to address the lack of a principled, corpus-driven treatment of lexicogrammatical patterns in the majority of commercial ELT materials. The syllabus uses a pedagogic corpus from which lexicogrammatical patterns are extracted and linked to data-driven learning exercises and corpus-driven pattern grammar, organized functionally and incorporated within a task-based framework. His preliminary evaluation showed the syllabus to be effective for raising and retaining student awareness of lexicogrammatical patterns, and confirms that traditional teaching approaches fail to highlight their importance for students by artificially separating lexis and grammar.

1

Developing Fluency

Paul Nation

What is fluency?

In general, fluency means making the best use of what is already known. Fillmore (1979) has described several senses of the word fluency, of which one was ‘the ability to fill time with talk’ (p. 93). If we apply this sense to a wider range of skills than speaking, then fluency can be described as the ability to process language receptively and productively at a reasonable speed. In this chapter, this is the definition that I want to use, noting that it is primarily a quantity-based definition rather than one that considers quality of production. Lennon (1990) investigated several measures of fluency in speaking using such a quantitative definition.

How should fluency fit into a language course?

Fluency development is one of the four strands of a well-balanced language course. The strands include meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development (Nation, 2007a). Each of these four strands should get roughly equal time in a course, so one quarter of the total time in a language course should be spent on fluency activities. However, the other three strands also contribute to fluency. The language-focused learning strand may involve the deliberate learning of multiword units, which, as Palmer (1925) has noted, can be the basis for early fluency in speaking—‘Memorize perfectly the largest number of common and useful word groups!’ (p. 187). The language-focused learning strand may also be where learners practice fluency in accessing individual words. The meaning-focused input and meaning-focused output strands are also likely to provide opportunities for fluency development if the burden of unknown words is not too heavy in activities in the strands.

These, however, are not substitutes for the fluency strand, and it is important that there is a fluency strand in the course from the very first day of learning. Even with a very small amount of language knowledge, learners should be able to use this knowledge in fluent ways. This is most clearly seen in courses with very limited goals, such as a course on survival English. The survival vocabulary for foreign travel (Nation & Crabbe, 1991) contains around 120 items that are very useful for a traveler spending a few days or weeks in another country. These include items like Thank you very much, How much does it cost? It’s delicious, and Goodbye. It may take just a few hours to memorize these 120 items, but it is important that they are not only memorized and pronounced correctly, but that they are also practiced so that they are fluently available for both reception and production under real time pressure.

It is important that each of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing has its own fluency development focus. As yet, there is no research looking at the effect of fluency development in one skill, for example reading, on another skill, for example writing. It is likely that there is some transfer between skills, but it is clearly most efficient to give skill-based fluency practice. In the following section we look at some of the most useful fluency development activities across the four skills.

What are the most useful fluency activities?

Fluency is important in the receptive skills of listening and reading as well as in the productive skills of speaking and writing. Although we tend to think of fluency as relating to speaking, people read at different speeds and write at different speeds. While learners need to read at different speeds with different kinds of material, they also need to be able to be flexible in their reading so that they can adjust their speed when they need to. Similarly, in listening, listeners have only small degrees of control over what they listen to, and so need to be able to adjust to the speed of the speaker.

In line with a skills-based approach to fluency development, the following activities are divided up into the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Listening fluency

Listening to easy stories

The teacher reads an interesting graded reader aloud to the learners as a serial, reading a few pages each day. As the learners get used to the story the teacher gradually speeds up the reading. Lists of prize-winning graded readers can be found on the Extensive Reading Foundation website at http://www.erfoundation.org/erf/.

Repeated listening to CDs

The learners listen to CDs that come with graded readers. They listen to the same story several times over several days until it is easy to listen to. One of the most exciting recent developments with the potential for improving listening fluency is the availability of digital recorders where the playback speed can be adjusted to be either slower or faster without distorting the pitch of the playback. This allows learners to listen slowly, and to increase the speed of their listening as they listen again to the same material or as their proficiency develops.

Focused repeated listening

The teacher writes the items to be learned, for example ways of referring to time (last week, next week, the day before yesterday, etc.), on the board and then says them quickly in random order while a learner points to them. Then the learners do this in pairs. The activity continues for several minutes until the learners are starting to get faster at recognizing the phrases.

Speaking fluency

4/3/2

The learners work in pairs. Learner A talks to learner B on a very familiar topic for four minutes. At the end of four minutes the teacher stops them and tells them to change partners. Then learner A gives exactly the same talk to their new partner for three minutes. They change partners once again, and learner A for the third time gives exactly the same talk to their new partner for two minutes. Then it is learner B’s turn (Maurice, 1983).

The best recording

The learner makes a recording of a short text. Then she listens to it and rerecords it until she is satisfied that this is her best recording of it.

Reading fluency

A speed reading course

The learners read very easy passages that are all the same length and record their speed on a graph. They answer multiple-choice questions and record their comprehension score on a graph. For controlled vocabulary speed reading courses, see Nation and Malarcher (2007), Paul Nation’s website at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation.aspx for a free 1,000-word-level speed reading course, and Sonia Millett’s website at http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/sonia-millett.aspx for free 1,000, 2,000, and 2,000-plus Academic Word List reading courses.

A speed reading course takes around ten minutes per session. It should run for around 20 sessions, which could be somewhere between seven and ten weeks. It requires no real work from the teacher and brings about substantial increases for most learners, meaning this small time investment brings large benefits (see Atkins, Chapter 14).

Easy extensive reading

The learners quickly read lots of easy graded readers that are well below their level. Working with very easy material means it can be processed at a speed that is faster than learners’ normal reading (see Waring, Chapter 12). This practice increases learners’ speed of access to these very common and useful words and phrases.

Repeated reading

Each learner reads the same short text three times in immediate succession. This activit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Developing Fluency
• Part II Speaking Fluency
• Part III Writing Fluency
• Part IV Reading Fluency
• Part V Listening Fluency
• Index