Are you Fluent or a Flunky?

ִApologies for the clickbaity title! I have really enjoyed learning and writing about Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in these blog posts, so I am going to continue to build on one of the concepts from the last one I wrote.  One of the language-learning tasks I mentioned in that previous post was fluency development. When we hear the word “fluency,” most of us think of “complete mastery” of some target language. While anyone who has a complete mastery of a language would in fact be fluent, I am not sure such a person exists. Needless to say, there are a few issues I have with this approach to fluency.

What Fluency Is Not

1. If “complete mastery” means knowing every word or grammatical rule in a language, then I wouldn’t be considered fluent in English, which I don’t think is the case. There are plenty of words, phrases, and idioms in English that I don’t know. When I don’t know a word in English, I still have to go and look it up. So my mastery of the language is not “complete” in this sense, but I would consider myself fluent in English. If this is an unfit understanding of fluency for my first language, it probably is unfit for a second language.
2. Complete mastery is an overwhelming (not to mention, impossible) goal to set in front of a new language learner. Giving such a lofty goal as “complete mastery” might send some learners into despair when they begin to struggle or even feel like they are struggling in their language learning. As a teacher, my job is to empower students by giving them goals they can accomplish, so that they can be encouraged as they learn. 
3. “Complete mastery” is rather vague about what “content” needs to be mastered. If I know all of the grammar concepts in the language, or if I have a complete linguistic analysis of a language, does that mean I am fluent? No. We want people to know how to communicate in the target language, not just talk about it in their native language. 

Defining Fluency

So what is fluency? I like to think of fluency as the ease of using a target language. In my previous post, I talked about fluency as how automatically someone can use the language. You don’t want to have to spend a few seconds between each word recalling vocab or how to construct the appropriate verb form or sentence. This occupies too many mental resources for the tasks of formation and recognition. While this is to be expected when someone first learns a new concept in their target language, it shouldn’t persist. These skills of recognition, formation, and syntactical arrangement can be made automatic with practice. This process of taking new concepts and automatizing them is what Nation called “fluency development.”* It is probably necessary to mention here that fluency, in addition to the mechanics of language formation, has to be concerned with accuracy and meaning. It cannot just refer to correct forms, but also with the appropriateness of the words in a given context.  

Measuring Fluency

Measuring language fluency is difficult because it includes a lot of internal mental processes that are rather hard to track. However, I think speed, endurance, and effort can be helpful metrics. If you can increase your speed when using the language, you are either thinking more quickly, or you aren’t having to think through each decision you make. This is a sure sign of automatization of the language. Endurance can be another helpful metric because it means you are able to cover more material without exhausting mental resources as quickly. Effort is the last “metric” that can be helpful here. If it feels like it is getting easier, then it probably is.** 

How do we develop fluency in Biblical Hebrew? 

Here are a couple of tangible ways to practice increasing your (reading) fluency.*** Pick a chapter of the Bible, assuming you know all of the vocab (if you don’t, you can learn it before hand). Read it once, making sure you understood everything. Now do the same thing, but try to go 15 second quicker, this time. You can keep doing this until you can’t get any faster. You can also take the chapter and set a timer for 5 minutes, and see how far you can read in those 5 minutes. Next time you read, set the alarm for another 5 minutes, but push yourself to make it further in the reading. These gradual steps will help increase your speed, but remember not to lose focus on the meaning of the text.   

Conclusion

The last question you might be asking is “Why”? Why work on fluency at all? “So what if it takes me a little more time to get through a reading? I have time. It’ll be okay.” While it doesn’t hurt to take your time reading, and sometimes it is necessary, fluency is the gift that keeps on giving. When your fleuncy increases you can take in larger and larger portions of the text. When you can read more text you get more natural exposure to the language. That continued exposure allows you to gain more intuitions about the language as you encounter it which in turn makes you more fluent. 

Notes

* I feel it necessary to reiterate that fluency development should not include any new vocab or grammar construction. It should only include material already learned.

**The advantage to the first two is that you can objectively measure your speed and the amount of material you cover with by using a timer, counting words/paragraphs/minutes, setting alarms. The last one is largely subjective. It isn’t a bad metric, but it won’t be consistent enough for you to rely on. We all have “on” days and “off” days.

***You can adapt similar exercises to develop fluency in the other language skills (speaking, writing, and listening), as well.