What Does it Mean to be Fluent In English?
I’m going to be working with Sonia (my learner at Literacy for Life) (not her real name) on improving her oral fluency in English – listening and speaking in practical situations. I’ve never thought much about this issue; my most common experience with learners at Literacy for Life has been preparing them for written tests – citizenship, GRE, various licensure tests, and so forth – and not as much with understanding spoken English and speaking the language so others can understand. But my own experience in traveling to other countries has convinced me that it’s not enough to just be able to read the language and understand verb tenses. You have to be able to ask questions – and, as importantly, you have to be able to understand the answers.
Here's a quick anecdote to make this point: my husband Tim and I took our children, Lori and Kevin, to London and Paris in 1986, when Lori was 14 and Kevin was 9. We stopped for lunch at a café in Bayeux (near the Normandy invasion beaches) and Kevin, of course, had to use the bathroom. One thing we all know about 9-year-old boys is that they always have to use the bathroom. Something to do with marking territory, I imagine. Anyway, we were eating our lunch at a table outside on the sidewalk, so we just told him to go in and ask someone where the bathroom was – using the phrase we had taught him, Ou est la toilette? He trotted on in (9-year-old boys also trot everywhere) and asked a waiter where the bathroom was. We were watching from our seats just outside the window, so we could see the waiter gesturing and talking, while Kevin (who was facing away from us) was nodding his head. When the waiter stopped talking, Kevin turned to the left and trotted on down the hallway. When he got back to the table a few minutes later – obviously having had success in finding la toilette – I asked him how he was able to understand the waiter’s rather extensive directions. Kevin told us that the first thing the waiter did was point down the hallway, and Kevin just waited until he stopped talking before Kevin said Merci (as we had also taught him) and went exploring until he found the bathroom.
Adult learners of English are often better at reading and writing English than they are at speaking and understanding it. As I’m planning how to work with Sonia on this broad set of skills, I’m finding that there’s lots of information “out there” about this very thing. Imagine that. I’m collecting websites that contain information on different ways to accomplish fluency.
One of the websites takes some time to define what fluency means. https://www.fluentu.com/blog/english/how-to-speak-english-well-fluently/#toc_1 Here’s what it says:
You know that you want to become fluent in English, but what does that mean?
There are two parts to fluency: knowing the language and knowing how to produce the language.
Being fluent means that you can use the English language comfortably. You can communicate freely and you can have conversations with native speakers without having to constantly look for help.
Fluency can also be seen in how you speak. You can know plenty of English vocabulary, but if you have to pause or repeat a lot when speaking, your fluency might not be so obvious to someone. If you speak very slowly or in a very flat, unemotional manner, then you won’t sound very fluent, either.
On the other hand, sounding fluent doesn’t mean you actually are speaking good English.
Insert: An Italian singer named Adriano Celentano memorably made this case in his ‘70s pop hit Prisencolinensinainciusol, which he wrote to make fun of the fact that at the time, Italians loved anything that SOUNDED like English, even if it was actually gibberish. I think you should listen to it. The dancing alone is worth three minutes of your time. Click on the picture to take advantage of the gloriousness of this video.
Now, back to the serious stuff:
To be fluent in English, you need to master both the language and how you speak it!
There’s often an expectation that you must know a certain number of words for fluency. But it’s important to remember that you can’t just study the words and grammar. It can be scary, but you’ll also need to practice actually speaking.
The website goes on to provide tips about fluency. Here’s the first tip:
Set Specific Goals
Fluency is a very high level to reach and will take a long time to achieve, so “becoming fluent” can be a pretty unclear goal. Having such a big, non-specific target won’t be helpful in planning out your studies.
That’s why you should think of more concrete and obvious goals that can lead you to fluency. By themselves, they may seem like small steps, but all together they’ll provide a steady path in your English learning journey.
Good goals should be specific and achievable. When setting a goal, you should decide exactly what you want to learn, and how long you want to spend learning it.
Here are some examples of good goals:
Learn 30 new English words in 30 days
Have a conversation with a native English speaker this week
Learn to conjugate five irregular verbs before your next tutoring lesson
Perfect your pronunciation of 10 words over the weekend (then ask a native speaker to tell you how you did!)
Make sure that the goals you set are reasonable and challenging enough to keep you motivated. You want to achieve your goals without over-stressing yourself!
As Sonia and I make our way through these (and other) suggestions, I’ll be consulting staff and other tutors at Literacy for Life to discover and practice strategies I haven’t thought of. I have also found several apps that provide an English language learner with the opportunity to practice speaking and listening, so I’m going to spend some time figuring out how these work.
Literacy for Life tests its learners periodically to see if their skills are improving. When we get further down the road, we’ll be able to take advantage of this testing process to see if we’re on the right track.
At Literacy for Life, learning is always a two-way street; as I help learners, I learn new things. It’s never dull.