Fluency Nativelike Selection and Nativelike Fluency

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3.6.3.2 Fluency

Nativelike fluency involves a knowledge of a body of sentence stems which, as we have stated above, consist of a fixed grammatical form and lexical content, and a label for a culturally recognized concept. These sentence stems are either retrieved as wholes or as automatic chains from long-term memory. Pawley and Syder produce evidence for the fact that even an adult native speaker has difficulty in sustaining fluency of speech when required to express his thoughts on an unfamiliar subject, or to “deliver an unrehearsed monologue to a silent audience”. There is no time to plan the syntactic and lexical content of a whole utterance; only a single phrase, or at most, a single clause can be planned at any one time. Pawley and Syder refer to this limitation as the “one clause at a time constraint” and explain their findings as follows: There is in fact a sizeable collection of evidence of several different kinds that the largest unit of novel discourse that can be fully encoded in one encoding operation is a single clause of eight to ten words. One kind of evidence pointing to this “one clause at a time constraint” on the planning of novel speech is the distribution of dysfluencies in spontaneous connected discourse. We find that even the most skilled and consistently fluent talkers regularly pause or slow down at the end of each clause of four to ten words, during a sustained piece of discourse, though they rarely do so in mid-clause. Their “fluent units” correlate highly with single clauses. “Fluent unit” is used here as a technical term to refer to a stretch of pause-free speech uttered at or faster than normal rate of articulation—about five syllables per second in English. 1983:202 Together with this correlation of fluent unit with single clause, most narrators also employ a particular syntactic “strategy”, known as “clause-chaining”. They string together a sequence of relatively independent clauses, “clauses which show little structural integration with earlier or later constructions” p. 202. This style contrasts with the “clause- integrating” strategy used for academic type discourse, “where exactness rather than fluency is most valued”. With the chaining style, it is easier to maintain grammatical and semantic continuity because the clauses “can be planned more or less independently” and so encoded and uttered without internal breaks. Pawley and Syder continue: We may speak, then, of a “one clause at a time facility” as an essential constituent of communicative competence in English: the speaker must be able regularly to encode whole - 76 - clauses, in their full lexical detail, in a single encoding operation and so avoid the need for mid-clause hesitations. p. 204

3.6.3.3 Memorized Sequences