I’m either fluent or I’m not fluent. That’s actually not true.
One thing we’re going to talk about extensively when we get into week 7 is
what fluency actually is. People tend to think of fluency as being a single thing which you
either have or you don’t. I’m Either fluent or I’m not fluent. That’s actually not true. And
actually what people mean by that is not fluency in the technical, scientific sense of the word.
What they actually mean is proficiency.See, fluency, spoken fluency, actually has
5 elements: encoding (which is you know, how do you learned those chunks and stored them in
long term memory), organisation (like how well is that information organised into networks of
language in your brain). And don’t worry about this too much for now by the way, because we’re
going to talk about this a lot in week 7.Motor skills which is the physical aspect
of fluency, that is, you know, has your tongue and your mouth muscles, all of that good stuff,
learn to move in the right kind of way. Then we have activation which is a technical term and
it really just means how awake your English is. And cognitive load which is everything
else that is happening. And if you’ve got a lot happening in your head, for example,
you are nervous, or you’re scared of what’s going on, then that will reduce performance
in English because it takes power away.So, for speaking, you need all five of
those elements working nicely together to create what we see as fluency.