The 3 levels of "Fluency"

When students approach me asking to help them be fluent, I have a moment of silence. What does fluency actually mean?

In my experience as a teacher I have met people that struggle making simple sentences, and people that struggle making complex sentences. Japanese students, for example, learn formal vocabulary in their school years in Japan, because their level of social interaction tends to be overall more formal. Likewise American students, not having a formal way to address people, tend to remain informal in all situations.

In our everyday life, this translates into the choice of vocabulary one makes when speaking. I simplified this into 3 levels of speech/fluency:

1. Children/ youth talk: the vocabulary is simple, sentences are short, straight to the point.

2. Adults: depending on the topic, the speaker will try to choose nicer words, nicer and longer sentence structure, developing thoughts at a deeper level.

3. Literature/business: the goal here is to speak fancy. The speaker will want to use less frequent words, use fancy connectors such as "therefore", "however" or "furthermore". The child/youth level might not understand it completely.

As a teacher, I think reaching the child/youth stage of speaking is the main goal. You may have to compromise on all the things you would like to say but cannot, and develop the ability of changing the sentences in your mother tongue to make them easier, more approachable, in the target language.

From here onward, the sky is the limit, as even a mother tongue speaker can develop and improve his ability to produce language for years and years. This is the beauty of the learning a language!

So, how fluent do you want to be?