What is Fluency? :From corpus to classroom

Ronald CarterSchool of English Studies, University of

Nottingham, UK

A corpus-based approach

Corpus (pl. corpora): a large, principled collection of texts, spoken and/or written.

BNC; WSC; MICASE. Based on the one billion word Cambridge

International Corpus (CIC) of both BrE and AmE, including CANCODE, an extensive written corpus, a business English corpus and a dedicated academic corpus.

Facts and figures …

Using a corpus gives us useful statistics about:

frequency differences between spoken and written

grammar and vocabulary social and contextual aspects

Top 40 most frequent words: 5m written

1 THE 2 TO 3 AND 4 OF 5 A 6 IN 7 WAS 8 IT 9 I 10 HE 11 THAT 12 SHE 13 FOR 14 ON 15 HER 16 YOU 17 IS 18 WITH 19 HIS 20 HAD 21 AS

22 AT 23 BUT 24 BE 25 HAVE 26 FROM 27 NOT 28 THEY 29 BY 30 THIS 31 ARE 32 WERE 33 ALL 34 HIM 35 UP 36 AN 37 SAID 38 THERE 39 ONE 40 BEEN

Top 40 most frequent words: 5m spoken

1 THE 2 I 3 AND 4 YOU 5 IT 6 TO 7 A 8 YEAH 9 THAT 10 OF 11 IN 12 WAS 13 IT'S 14 KNOW 15 MM 16 IS 17 ER 18 BUT 19 SO 20 THEY 21 ON

22 OH 23 WE 24 HAVE 25 NO 26 LAUGHS 27 WELL 28 LIKE 29 WHAT 30 DO 31 RIGHT 32 JUST 33 HE 34 FOR 35 ERM 36 BE 37 THIS 38 ALL 39 THERE 40 GOT

[Speakers are discussing the cost of veterinary treatment and surgery for a sick animal] <S1> Let’s see ... we’ve already spent fifty for him and I want him to spend another hundred <S2> Well <S1> But that’s better than pins <S2> Right <S1> And surgery <S2> Which would be another two hundred or <S3> Yeah it’s more for a surgery

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Textbook DialogueFergus: What did you do last weekend ? Eliot: I went shopping. Fergus: Who did you go shopping with? Eliot: I went shopping with my friend Fergus: What did you buy? Eliot : I bought some clothes

 

 

Fluency, confluence and strategic competence:

Dyu: did you, [0.9 secs] er, did you you see David at the meeting, er, last night, no, the night before, wasn’t it?

(CIC corpus)

…so er what did Marketing do they did it that way and they introduced, [mm, right], yeah, and last year they introduced [0.8 secs] eight new products in just six months, eight that’s erm [1.1.secs]huge, it is, isn’t it? [yeah]You know what I mean?

(CIC corpus)

20 most frequent turn-opener tokens

(CANCODE sub-corpus; social conversations)

1.Yeah 11.Mm

Oh And 

I No 

[laughs] Well

Yes But

You it's

So It

What Right

The that's

10.Erm 20.That

Fluent spoken language Fewer pauses and hesitations? Longer uninterrupted runs? Higher rate of speech? Complete sentences and long words? (models of written

discourse) Automatic speech

absence of ‘sentences’ ‘incomplete’ utterances flexible structures. (not necessarily complete sentences) jointly produced and confluent utterances use of small words. Small words are big words (well, right,

just, at all, sort of, I mean) that often have interactive pragmatic functions.

Chunks and automaticity

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From Words to Collocations to Chunks

Single words Collocations (lean meat; *strong car) Idioms and phrases (having forty winks) Formulaic language (chunks) (Have a nice

day)a sequence , continuous or discontinuous,of words or other elements, which is or appearsto be prefabricated: that is stored or retrievedwhole from memory...’ (Wray, 2002)

Formulaic sequences: how fixed is fixed?

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

occs

in 5

m w

ds s

poke

n

Words v. Chunks

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1 YOU KNOW 28,013

2 I MEAN 17,158

3 I THINK 14,086

4 IN THE 13,887

5 IT WAS 12,608

6 I DON'T 11,975

7 OF THE 11,048

8 AND I 9,722

9 SORT OF 9,586

10 DO YOU 9,164

11 I WAS 8,174

12 ON THE 8,136

13 AND THEN 7,733

14 TO BE 7,165

15 IF YOU 6,709

16 DON'T KNOW 6,614

17 TO THE 6,157

18 AT THE 6,029

19 HAVE TO 5,914

20 YOU CAN 5,828

Top 20 2-word chunks (spoken)

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Top 5 6-word chunks (spoken)

1 DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

236

2 AT THE END OF THE DAY 222

3 AND ALL THE REST OF IT 64

4 AND ALL THAT SORT OF THING

41

5 I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS 38

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Seven and beyond?

Chunks bigger than six or seven words are rare – the magic number 7

Bigger chunks are ‘learned texts’, e.g. quotations, proverbs, etc.

Issues of working memory (single tone units!) Fluency as a social AND cognitive

phenomenon

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Two Main Types of Chunk

prefaces I don’t know if …I was going to say…

integrated items

as a matter of factsort ofor something like that

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Functions of Chunks

1. Discourse marking (linking and structuring) (well; right; if you see what I mean; and then; so)

2. Prefaces and politeness (I wondered if; I don’t know if..)

3. Hedging, boosting and vagueness (sort of; as a

matter of fact, to be honest with you and stuff like that)

Materials development and drills?

Native/non-native fluencies:

Extract 1 1 A o:h yea:h 2 (0.9) er:: yest- (0.4) yesterday, 3 (0.3) oh yeah. 4 (0.2) my seven days is almost all days 5 (0.4) i worked. (1.0) [a part time j- ] 6 B a:h [you have a part time] job? 7 A yes.

 

Native/non-native fluencies (cont)

Extract 2 1 A so: where do you (0.6) often 2 (0.8) go (.) to buy sh- (0.4) clothes? 3 B (1.0) nn: i almost never go to buy clothes.= 4 A =wow. ((both speakers laughter)) wow.= 5 B =but nn:: (1.4) [yeah sometimes] 6 A [you:r ] wife? 7 B (0.3) sometimes my wife will buy me a shirt.= 8 A =oh good.  

Cambridge ESOL oral examination data, Advanced English (CAE) level (at C1 of the CEFR)

<Examiner> First of all we'd like to know a little bit about you. Erm where do you both live?

<Candidate 01> I I I live in (place name) in South Korea yes.

<Candidate 02> And I live in (place name). It's in Switzerland and it's near Zurich.

<Examiner> (Candidate name) how long have you been studying English?

<Candidate 01> Well actually I study English mm in junior high school and high school for six years around for six years.

<Examiner> Different classes. Good. Now I'd like you to ask each other something about things you particularly like about living in this country and entertainment and leisure facilities in this area.

[intervening text]

<Candidate 02> Erm I like to go erm to see a movie.

<Candidate 01> Mm.

<Candidate 02> I see a lot of them since I've been here and I like to go to pubs and+

<Candidate 01> Ah.

<Candidate 02> +together with friends and=

<Candidate 01> =Yeah me too actually. (c) Cambridge Assessment

Cont... Showing confidence through recognising

silences Taking control through turn initiation Ability to repair breakdowns and maintain

turns Holding on to the turn by:

Smooth turn boundaries (Low-rise boundary tones)

Filled pauses Repetition Avoiding long silent pauses Multi-modal means.

Fluency and competence: social and cognitive

Learning to speak fluently does not always imply an uninterrupted flow of speech that is sequentially and grammatically irreproachable. The ‘good’ speaker ‘knows’ how to hesitate, how to be silent, how to self correct, how to interrupt and how to complete expressions or leave them unfinished.... (Sajavaara, 1987)

Linguistic knowledge is what is stored in memory; fluency is access to this store. (Wood, 2010)

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Fluency and Spoken English: Other issues

Fluency as a temporal phenomenon (speech rates, tempo and whole units)

Fluency as an interactive phenomenon and primarily about the speaker and listener. Fluency is confluence.

Chunks (formulaic language) and small words. Fluency and fluencies and strategic competence. Pedagogies for fluencies (drills, memorisation,

modelling etc in relation to automaticity) Pauses and silences and ‘language levels’. Fluency, ELF (nativeness) and testing issues.

English in the World First Language Speakers:  Mandarin Chinese: 1.2 billion English: 508 million Hindi: 487 million Spanish: 417 million Russian: 277 million Bengali: 211 million

Additional or Second or Foreign Language Speakers:

English: 2 billion by 2020. Chinese: 30 million by 2020. Spanish: 25 million by 2020.

from Graddol (2007)