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Achieving
Fluency
by Teacher Eddy Hsu
adapted from information sourced on the internet
 In
order to achieve a high level of fluency in spoken English, you
must be aware of certain fundamental things. Let’s try to understand
them.
The first thing you should understand about a language is that a
language has two tracks, a sound track and a script track. The sound
track comes first, and then the script track. In other words, speech
comes first, and writing comes after.
There should be no debate about this. Let’s explore this on two
scales. First, a child learns to speak long before he learns to
write. And second, we (as people) have been speaking long before
we have been writing. This is all proof that the spoken stage of
a language comes before the written stage.
In some ways, speech and writing are the same, yet in some ways,
they are different. They are the same because script is the representation
of speech in another media. Yet, they are different because they
aren’t to be taught nor learned in the same way. This is true about
any language. English isn’t an exception.
Most non-native speakers of English find it hard to speak English
fluently. This is because non-native learners are born and brought
up where English is spoken as a foreign language. Conditions don’t
allow them to learn English, their second language, the way they
learned their first language. Most of the time, they have been taught
English the wrong way. They have been learning English in a way
that is against the natural order of language acquisition. Most
non-native speakers of English don’t have the opportunity of learning
English in the natural order of language acquisition.
Typically, non-native speakers of English learn English in the unnatural
way. They have been learning to read and write English first, rather
than to listen and speak it. They have been learning to produce
written English. This is a big problem because spoken English is
quite different from written English.
This unnatural order of acquiring language results in one thing,
the learners’ understanding of English being oriented incorrectly.
The learners’ incorrect orientation prevents and hinders them from
understanding that fluent or spontaneous speech is composed of material
different from that of which writing is composed. In writing, you
write word by word, but in speaking you do not. Speaking word by
word is not fluent. But, learners who have the incorrect orientation
to the correct order of language acquisition always try to speak
the way they read and write. They try with a lot effort to follow
rules of grammar and usage as applied to writing, and not as applied
to speech. This is why fluency has remained elusive to non-native
speakers of English. It must not be forgotten that speech is the
fundamental basis for writing, and not vice-versa. Speaking is more
fundamental than writing.
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