Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

words” (p. 358). For him, automaticity in speech is important if students are to develop fluency. He stated that fluency depends on “procedural knowledge…or knowing how to do something, rather than declarative knowledge, or knowledge about something” (p. 358). He identified fluency as a skill rather than knowledge, thus emphasising performance over competence. Foster and Skehan (1996) followed Schmidt in taking fluency to reflect the capacity to cope with real-time communication. Gatbonton and Segalowitz (1988) have suggested that there are two broad aspects of fluency. One is the “skills concerned with selection of utterances” (i.e., knowing what to say and what is appropriate), and the other is the “skills concerned with the actual production of these utterances” (p. 473). Skill in the first aspect does not necessarily guarantee mastery in the second skill, however. Students may know what to say and be able to plan the necessary forms in advance of a forthcoming communication situation, but still be unable to articulate them fluently when they are actually needed. The second component develops through a process of automatisation which comes through “extended and consistent practice of rapid, smooth, comfortable speaking skills” (p. 474). By automating certain aspects of performance, skilled performers free up attentional resources and are able to “allocate their limited capacities” (p. 475) to where they are needed most. They use the example of a musician, where the need to be able to conduct certain activities, such as arpeggios, using little or no psychological resources is paramount if skilled performance is to be achieved.

Other scholars have emphasised the listeners and the part they play in the communication process. Lennon (1990) took the listener into account in documenting the components of fluency and suggested that “fluency is an impression on the listener's part that the psycholinguistic processes of speech planning and speech production are functioning easily and efficiently” (p. 391). He suggested that fluency “reflects the speaker's ability to focus the listener's attention on his or her message…rather than…the working of the production mechanisms” (p. 391). He argued that listeners may be “unduly intolerant” (p. 394) of certain non-native features