Abstract: This article re-examines the notion of spoken fluency. Fluent and fluency are
terms commonly used in everyday, lay language, and fluency, or lack of it,
has social consequences. The article reviews the main approaches to
understanding and measuring spoken fluency and suggest that spoken
fluency is best understood as an interactive achievement, and offers the
metaphor of �confluence� to replace the term fluency. Many measures of
spoken fluency are internal and monologue-based, whereas evidence from a
variety of research both within and without linguistics and applied
linguistics suggest that speakers fine-tune their performances to one
another. I report ongoing research into features of spoken language, such as
automaticity and turn-boundary phenomena, which illuminate the interactive
processes involved in fluent production. The applications of such research
will be directed towards the empirical underpinning of the Common
European Framework (CEFR) level descriptors for spoken language
through the English Profile project.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 14
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