Grammar The Elements of Speaking
comparison with native speakers . “
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they elaborated the four levels, The four levels are 1. halting, slow speech, noticeable breaks between words, seems to
require much effort; 2. speech is uneven, some noticeable breaks between words, seems to require effort, occasionally halting, tend to but not necessarily have
slower speech rate than level three; 3. relatively smooth and effortless speech but rate of speech is slower than native or perceptibly non-native; and 4. relatively
smooth, native-like rate of speech. The man who investegated about fluency is Fillmore, as Fillmore
conceptualised fluency in four different ways. First, he defined fluency as the ability to talk at length with few pauses and to be able to fill the time with talk.
Second, a fluent speaker is not only capable of talking without hesitations but of expressing hisher message in a coherent, reasoned and semantically densed
manner. Third, a person is considered to be fluent if heshe knows what to say in a wide of range of contexts. Finally, Fillmore argued that fluent speakers are
creative and imaginative in their language use and a maximally fluent speaker has all of the above mentioned abilities. These definitions suggest that fluency can be
measured by looking at the speed and flow of language production, the degree of control of langugae and the way language and content interact.
For Beatens Beardsmore, oral fluency is understood to imply a communicative competence requiring an ability to formulate accurate and
appropriate utterances of more than one sentence in length ”
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. He explained his concept of fluency in these terms: Oral fluency requires the ready availability of
this communicative competence for the formulation of appropriate utterances in real time, involving a strategy for the elaboration of sentence structures, as well as
the selection and insertion of lexical items. Individual sentences must be integrated into connected discourses. Beardsmore selected specific criteria and
established them as a function of his aims. These are : fluency tentatively defined as the ability to give proof of sustained oral communicative spontaneous
competence, use of production as well implying as the conversational a certain
15
Marguerite E. Ascione, Fluency Development in Second Language Teaching, Alberta: University Of Lethbridge, 1985, p. 8.
16
Marguerite E. Ascione, op. cit., p. 10.
unstilted, lubricants, accuracy structural and lexical, relevance, intelligibility, pronunciation, variety of structures and variety of lexis.
It is interesting to note that fluency is considered here as one element of oral fluency assessment, which in this case one could call oral proficiency. When
speaking fluently students should be able to get the messeage across with what ever resources and abilites they have got, regardless of gramatical and other
mistakes. As one of important aspects in speaking, fluency become standart of assesment in speaking test.