G.B.C. 14 How to fake fluency

It's all just smoke and mirrors

Image Credit
theilr via Flickr

Nearly 15% of your G.B.C. score is for fluency. Fluency is something that will develop over time, but there are some ways you can fake it! This lesson will show you how.

Introduction

What is fluency anyway? Discuss it with your teacher.

I think that we can define fluency by saying what it isn't. Fluency is not speed. It is smoothness. It is the ability to fluidly express yourself, with minimal pauses and without broken sentences. It has nothing to do with accuracy. As such, a person can speak fluently, but with lots of mistakes. It implies a certain amount of articulation, but not perfection.

Make this point:

With a little bit  of practice, and 5 easy techniques, you can seem more fluent.

Warm Up

Have a go at a couple of G.B.C. questions, and try to answer fluently. (Don't worry about anything else.)

Ask your student these questions. After they have answered, get them to judge for themselves if they think that they have answered fluently or not. If not, see if they can tell you why.

  1. What skills or traits does your company look for in new recruits?
  2. Tell me about the orientation process. How could it be improved?
Language

Your teacher will demonstrate and explain the five ways you can immediately speak more fluently:

  1. respond immediately;
  2. confirm;
  3. use fillers;
  4. slow down; and
  5. say what you can.

Go through each of the following points, with examples from the student's answers questions above

  1. Respond: teach your student to use rejoinders and try to minimise their response time.
    • Examples:
      "Really?";
      "I know";
      "Sure"; and
      "I see what you mean" etc.
  2. Confirm: copy, repeat and rephrase the other person. This is echoing. This is showing interest. This is to make sure you have understood.
    • A simple example:
      "Have you ever lived overseas?" "Overseas? Me? Yeah..."
  3. Fillers: This is a review of the last class on filling pauses. Open that lesson and see which of those fillers you can work into the answers from the warm up questions.
  4. Slow down: Good public speakers speak pretty slow (think Obama) and if you listen carefully to native speakers, we often pause (not for too long) and repeat a key point and paraphrase. This gives extra weight to the points you are making and shows you are thinking (better than a robotic, memorized spiel).
    • Example:
      "I used to work for an IT company. It was... How should I put it? Not a great company. So, it was a bad place to work, this IT company, and I wanted a change. I wanted to do something different. More challenging. So I started looking at consulting."
  5. Say what you can say: There is going to be a whole lesson on this, but basically the point is to get people away from saying what they want to say, and encourage them to say what they are able to say. But only in the test—in lessons, they should do the opposite of this. Essentially, the idea is to 'tailor their answer' (i.e. lie) to the level of English that they have. They should simplify their idea, or talk about something different. See if you can eek out a different answer from the warm up questions that demonstrates their English skills better (recall lesson 1 of this course) and is easier for them to deliver (i.e. more fluent).
    • Example:
      Instead of saying honestly how the training process was, what could you say differently that would be easier to express in English you know?
Practice

Now let's practice! Let's go through some more questions and see if you can fake fluency.