Hi Gisella,
I’ll keep this one brief, because every time I write something on this, someone copies my response and puts it on the “Dw i’n dysgu Cymraeg” group on Facebook as some kind of “Look at this fool who thinks SSIW is really good” sort of pathetic thing.
…Anyway…
I think a lot of people get confused between two different things. 1. Fluency and 2. Mastery. Lots of people simply don’t know that “Mastery” exists, so they confuse “Fluency” as just being the ability to know every single word in the dictionary for a given language.
Fluency - coming from the word Fluid, is something that moves and grows, it grows in some areas, it shrinks in some areas, but it always moves.
For example, I’ve considered myself a fluent Welsh speaker for about 15-18 months now. Am I better now than I was 15-18 months ago? I am a lot better. Do I have a bigger vocabulary now than I did then? Yes, definitely.
So how can I be “More fluent” now than I was then? Because “fluency” isn’t a finishing line per se.
Fluency for me, although I try not to get caught up on it, is the idea of being able to function in a day to day life in your target language without the need to fall back on another language. If you can function for an extended period of time, you can deal with everyday situations, you can use your future and past tenses, you can express feelings, thoughts and emotions through the language, you can think on your feet in the language and you can do all of this without any problems - then its likely you are a fluent speaker.
The problem is… there is no “fluency test”. So one person’s “fluent” is another person’s “I am Intermediate”, which is another person’s “I’m a learner”. Fluency really is in the eye of the beholder.
Let me give you another example. I am a fluent English speaker - but there are lots of things/areas that I know absolutely nothing about: law, brain surgery, the mechanics of a diesel car engine for example. Now even though I am a fluent English speaker, if you made me attend a two hour lecture on the inner workings of say corporate law in English – I’d probably understand very little if anything, despite being a fluent English speaker.
The same is true if I take an area I know a lot about (Football or computers for example) and I started talking to a fluent English speaker who had never seen a football match in their lives, it’s likely they wouldn’t understand most of what I spoke about. Does this make them less fluent? No - because fluency is relative. We know lots about some things, and very little about most things.
Mastery is a totally different thing, but so many people confuse fluency with mastery. Mastery is when you are at a level where even if you’ve never come across words before, you’ll still have a really good idea of what they mean already - most native speakers of languages probably fall under this category.
Fluency doesn’t equal a number of words in your vocab, for me it represents your ability to live in the language. This is the reason why you get the odd scenario where a 7 or 8 year old kid who has been speaking a language since birth can still not have achieved fluency, whereas an adult learner with 3-6 months experience could maybe… with masses of work achieve it.
There will be people who will feel fluent after a short period of time, and there will be people who will feel fluent after a long period of time, or even never.