aka how to improve speaking fluency
When students are speaking, what do they need for fluency?
They need content, adequate language, confidence, pronunciation. But my tutor Johanna says that fluency is recognised especially when in a conversation we can use chunks and we can co-operate with the other speaker. Co-operation lies in turn-taking and response, in interaction and in how much the two people work together to move the conversation on. Chunks are those groups of words which help discourse marking (you know what I mean, at the end of the day, something like that), hedging and vagueness (sort of, I don’t know,…), politeness (I wonder if, I don’t know if,…). They go together with collocations and discourse markers to identify a fluent speaker.
When it comes to strategies, we should encourage learners to imitate interaction patterns, we can help them activate chunks that they have learnt, give them language for response and encourage follow-up questions, give them language for hesitation as it would sound more natural not to be silent at all when we don’t know what to say.
When students are speaking, what do they need to be prepared for real interaction then?
check these articles out to find a clue
Training Into Europe 