“She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
It is indeed ,one of the most controversial words in English .
Oxford dictionary states that fluency is :
The ability to speak or write a foreign language easily and accurately.
meanwhile
Merriam-Webster says that fluency is :
having or showing mastery of a subject or skill fluent in math
So why all that ‘’ hype ‘’ about it
It is because people see the words ‘’ easily ‘’ ‘’ accurately. ’ in different aspects
which mean that for some people by having a limited vocabulary but an ability to use it ‘’ easily ‘’ ‘’ accurately. ’ and recall it in any time you are fluent ,thought it could be on a very daily basis .
others see it differently their understanding of the word is the ability to speak and write in a large range of subject . something in the same ilk of c2 level .
Another thing is about the skills 's fluency
We all know the four skills in any language speaking , writing , listening and reading
Now, the question is can one be fluent in just one or tow
some people say you can not if you fluent in one skill then you are fluent in all four on the other hand some say you can
let say we have an English native speaker he speaks and understand what he listen but he can not read nor he can write
And on the opposite one can be a fluent reader but hardly can speak
So , your fluency differs from one skill to another .
I think when your comfortable. You understand without missing many words, you can isolate and ask about the word you didn’t understand. You can get your points across. Your always improving bit by bit. Of course the native speaker is always better at speaking, but you can keep up with them. You can make phone calls, understand alot of tv, read most things without too many unknown words. That’s fluency for
I’m tutoring an ESL student and I can see her approaching fluency. Probably only 3 or 4 months away. She already reads and writes very well, but her conversations are slow, she searches for the right word, her syntax is a little tangled at times. She’ll be a fluent speaker once the hesitation largely disappears and she can hear the spoken language at a normal speed. She is working on it 6 or 8 hours a day, so week to week you can see progress.
She studied in Brazil throughout High School, but they focused strictly on grammar, reading and writing. She came to the US in March of this year speaking very little English, started focusing on speaking about three months ago and has made very good progress. Her pronunciation is very good, but gets tripped up by the tendency of a lot of Portuguese speakers to want to pronounce every vowel. That doesn’t work in English.
Well , it depend upon her wish i mean does she like… wants to speak because she is applying for something or she just wants to improve that skill as a part of a whole and wants to speak to others.
As i said it depend on you if interesting in revamping it and on your needs .
When I think of fluency in a language I think of being able to carry on everyday conversations with native speakers and only very rarely missing every day words. I also think you can separate reading and listening from reading and writing in the same language in terms of fluency. For example: I know of people who can communicate without any trouble in Japanese but cannot read pretty much at all. There are also native speakers of all languages that cannot read or write and I’d say they’re fluent.
For me fluency is the ability to hold a conversation flow. Please, notice fluency = flow. It does not mean we do not make mistakes but that the listener can flow with us and it is willing to converse. To pretend that it is speaking without faults is absurd. Even those who are native make a lot of grammatical mistakes when they speak. And writing ? Many of them write very poorly. So when we can speak automatically then we are fluent. I suspect that fluency happens at the B1-B2 threshold. Before that level, we are very limited on what we can say and there is no much automaticity.
At least this is my understanding. considering that the meaning of a word is NOT what the dictionary says but what the common people accept as the case. When someone says, “Hey, you are fluent in Polish.” It means to me that they hear me speak fluently, that is, without to many hesitation and they follow what I say and have a great time.
I have the feeling that we give to much attention to fluency when what really count is to embrace the language we study. We will know when are fluent/: the natives will tell us.