Fluency Specialist

Speaking Clinic Intro is for pre-intermediate and low intermediate level English language learners. At this point in their language development, students understand the basics of English and are able to communicate in limited sentences, use some connecting words, converse on familiar topics, ask for clarification, and have a good grasp of common, everyday vocabulary. The difficulty for many language learners at this point is that their reading, writing, and grammatical skills are stronger than their verbal and listening skills. They often still translate directly from their first language before speaking, thereby limiting their fluency. These students also often are more comfortable listening for individual meaning rather than meaning as a whole and have difficulty inferring meaning from context. Many students also have difficulty differentiating formality of language and end up sounding too formal. In particular, Speaking Clinic Intro targets the difficult areas of spontaneous speech, nuance and meaning, natural sounding functional language, chunking and colloquial expressions.