Fluency versus accuracy

In my work as a lan­guage and com­mu­ni­ca­tion coach I en­deav­our to help my clients un­der­stand the dif­fer­ence be­tween speed and flu­ency as com­mu­ni­ca­tors, and the need to mon­i­tor the for­mer when we speak so as not to de­liver a stream of un­de­ci­pher­able speech, es­pe­cially in a sec­ond lan­guage.

In this col­umn, I want to take that one step fur­ther and dis­cuss the flu­ency ver­sus ac­cu­racy di­chotomy in com­mu­ni­ca­tion. De­spite being a very sim­ple con­cept, many of my clients are un­aware of it until we ad­dress it in one of our ses­sions. The basic premise is that the more flu­ent we are, the less ac­cu­rate we be­come, and vice versa.

So what does this mean for us as com­mu­ni­ca­tors, and par­tic­u­larly when using Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage? The an­swer is clear: if we try to speak per­fect Eng­lish, we lose flu­ency, but if we try to in­crease our flu­ency, we make more er­rors. A dilemma as well as a di­chotomy, then.

The con­cept is eas­ily wit­nessed in the way dif­fer­ent cul­tures ap­proach com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I have lived in var­i­ous dif­fer­ent coun­tries and ex­pe­ri­enced both ex­tremes: as a young man I lived in Japan, where ac­cu­racy is highly val­ued, and it was there­fore not un­com­mon to wait sev­eral sec­onds for some­one to elab­o­rate a sen­tence. This in­sis­tence on pre­ci­sion comes, of course, at the cost of bor­ing the wait­ing lis­tener and los­ing their at­ten­tion. By way of con­trast, the op­po­site is true in this coun­try. Peo­ple here tend to speak so fast that they do not pause to con­sider the ac­cu­racy of the lan­guage they pro­duce, with the re­sult­ing con­fu­sion for the lis­tener, who has only un­der­stood a cer­tain amount of what their in­ter­locu­tor has said. In other words, what ap­pears as flu­ent Eng­lish can ac­tu­ally be quite poorly com­mu­ni­cated and the mes­sage un­clear.

So how do we ad­dress this di­chotomy? In my work as a lan­guage and com­mu­ni­ca­tion coach, I help my clients iden­tify where they are on the scale when they com­mu­ni­cate in Eng­lish: more ori­ented to­wards flu­ency or ac­cu­racy, and then make the nec­es­sary ad­just­ment.

So how do we do that? It’s ac­tu­ally pretty sim­ple: if you over-em­pha­sise flu­ency, you need to in­tro­duce more pauses to give room for mon­i­tor­ing your lan­guage while speak­ing. A com­mon mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion is that peo­ple get bored or switch off if we pause, but the ju­di­cious use of pauses and si­lence in our speech, as well as sim­ply slow­ing down, will im­prove your com­mu­nica­tive com­pe­tence no end. One thing I show my clients is that a pause is never as long as you think it is when speak­ing.

If you over-em­pha­sise ac­cu­racy, on the other hand, it’s about ac­cept­ing that you will make small lan­guage er­rors as the cost of im­prov­ing your com­mu­ni­ca­tion style, and there­fore not dwelling so long on ac­cu­rate lan­guage use while speak­ing. Ei­ther way, a lan­guage coach will put you right in no time.