摘要：This article re-examines the notion of spoken fluency. Fluent and fluency are terms commonly used in everyday, lay language, and fluency, or lack of it, has social consequences. The article reviews the main approaches to understanding and measuring spoken fluency and suggest that spoken fluency is best understood as an interactive achievement, and offers the metaphor of 'confluence' to replace the term fluency. Many measures of spoken fluency are internal and monologue-based, whereas evidence from a variety of research both within and without linguistics and applied linguistics suggest that speakers fine-tune their performances to one another. I report ongoing research into features of spoken language, such as automaticity and turn-boundary phenomena, which illuminate the interactive processes involved in fluent production. The applications of such research will be directed towards the empirical underpinning of the Common European Framework (CEFR) level descriptors for spoken language through the English Profile project.
关键词：fluency; interaction; corpora; spoken language
