There's certainly some truth
in this. But please be clear about what such an exam
or test can actually do. If competent instructors
have long conversations in English with the learners,
and if they put them through a series of oral
tests in English, then they can certainly evaluate
the performance of those learners at the time of
the test and say how fluently they spoke in English
at the time of the test. Yes, at the time of
the test.
But mind you, such an evaluation
can't be as realistic as a self-evaluation
by the learners themselves. No. The reason is this:
Suppose that some learners perform well at a final
test. Based on that performance alone, can anybody
say that those learners do speak fluent English
spontaneously in almost all the real-life situations
they face? You see, any evaluation of whether someone
is fluent or not can be said to be realistic only
if the evaluator can say that they speak fluent English
in almost all real-life situations they face. You'll
agree that the only person who'll be able to make
such an assessment is the learner himself/herself.
Fluency
learners, the best judges to measure their own progress
Remember this: What
is really important is the progress of the
learners through the weeks or months of their self-effort,
rather than their performance at a final test.
Their performance at a final test is perhaps important
only to the extent that it helps to measure their
progress through the whole period of their self-effort.
Now if you want to measure their
progress through the whole period of their self-effort,
it's not enough that you assess their performance
at a final test. You also have to know the level of
their fluency at the start of their effort
in real-life situations - and how well they can perform
in most of the real-life situations they face after
learning from each of the Fluentzy books. Yes,
real-life situations. Now, aren't the learners
themselves the only people who are competent to say
all this?
Mind you, all this doesn’t mean that
only the speaker himself/herself will be able to say
whether they're fluent — or that other people won't
be able to find this out at all. What all this means
is simply this: The learners themselves are the most
competent people to evaluate and say how effective
the self-study course they’ve done has been in helping
them improve their fluency. You see, in other
subjects and skills, this may not be so. But as far
as the fluency skill is concerned, it is.
You don't need an expert
to say you aren't fluent
Just
because learner-performance in certain subjects or
skills can be evaluated in a certain way, many people
tend to think that learner-performance in the fluency
skill can also be evaluated effectively in the same
way. But mind you, such a comparison is not
valid.
As far as other subjects or skills
are concerned, you need an expert to test and say
how well you perform. This is because, as far as other
subjects or skills are concerned, the test involves
a test of the knowledge of the 'content' of what you
say or write. And your performance has to show a display
of that knowledge - according to a large number
of rigid criteria fixed by authorities on that content.
But you see, the test of the fluency
skill does not involve such a test of the knowledge
of the 'content' of what you say. And your performance
does not have to show a display of that knowledge
according to any criteria fixed by any authorities.
When you decide whether someone is speaking English
fluently, the quality or correctness or truth-value
of the 'content' is not relevant. The only criteria
for judging whether you speak English fluently are
whether you speak English smoothly and continuously,
whether your language is appropriate and reasonably
accurate, and whether you make sense. (And remember
this: The degree of grammatical and lexical accuracy
required in speech is quite relaxed and loose
- and isn't as strict or exact as that in writing).
So as far as the fluency skill is
concerned, you don't need an expert to say how well
you perform. You perform well if you speak fluently,
and you don't perform well, if you don't. And every
speaker is perfectly competent to say whether they're
speaking fluently or not on a particular occasion.
Test performance, not really
important in fluency training
From what we've discussed so
far, you can see one thing: Fluency is not a subject
in which your performance at a final exam or test
decides whether you've succeeded or failed in your
efforts to become fluent. No.
Actually, such an exam or test is
not really necessary — even to find out if
the learners have been working sincerely. You see,
when somebody spends money and buys a set of books
specially written to help people build fluency and
does a self-study course using those books, it is
only reasonable to expect that they're sufficiently
motivated by a need to become fluent and that they
sincerely mean to learn from those books.
And we've seen just now that fluency
is not a skill that can effectively be measured by
an 'objective' sort of exam or test. The cost of any
'subjective' sort of exam or test would be prohibitive,
and so would not be feasible. And that's not all.
Even if a subjective test is given to a learner, it
can't effectively tell the examiner how consistently
fluent the learner is in real-life situations - which
is what is really important.
And mind you, fluency is not a final
destination that you can reach. You can think of the
fluency skill as a continuum from zero to infinity.
Somebody who's not fluent at all moves up along that
fluency gradient - and they keep on moving up all
their life. You see, there can be no end to that movement
or journey. This is because fluency is an ever-expanding
skill. So strictly speaking, we can only speak in
terms of various degrees or levels of
fluency.
