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The focus of classroom work and the
focus of fluency work are not the same. They’re very
different. And so classroom work can’t help you achieve
true fluency.
In classrooms, your aim is to produce
work for display to an evaluator. And not to use what
you produce to communicate. In classrooms, your aim
is to organize language into sentences set in stone.
To design language units as monuments. And not to produce
language as part of an ongoing communicative process.
But in real-life situations, you have
to produce language as part of an ongoing communicative
process. That is, real-life situations ask you to communicate.
To talk to people as one individual to another. By organizing
your language into ‘here-and-now communication units’.
Here you have to put your language to actual real-time
use. Exploratorily. Manipulatively. By going on meeting
the ever-fluctuating communicative needs.
Classrooms can give you only a kind
of knowledge that helps you to produce examples of language
— and to demonstrate usage. That kind of knowledge can’t
help you to actually use a language in natural circumstances.
Real-time language use needs fluency — the ability to
deal with the real-life communicative pressures using
that language.
Only specialized fluency work can give
you this ability. Fluency work outside classrooms. In
real-life situations: In real-life communicative situations
that are part of your own social or career life. And
not in fictitious situations created in classrooms or
by cassettes/CDs. Mind you, real-life fluency needs
real-life-situations!
Learn fluency principles & strategies
first. And start using them to produce and manipulate
speech — in every real-life situation you handle in
English. Fluency-demanding, English-intensive situations.
In your job. Profession. Business. Daily life... That’s
the right kind of speaking-experience. Real-time speaking-experience
and practice. And from then on, every real-life speech-experience
is a true fluency experience. This is true fluency work.
And this is the only way to achieve true fluency.
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