DEVELOPING AUTOMATICITY IN CONNECTED SPEECH: AUDIO-LINGUAL DRILLS FOR UPPER-INTERMEDIATE LEARNERS MASTERING ASSIMILATION AND ELISION

Upper-intermediate (B2) learners commonly struggle with fluency and listening. This is because they have difficulty adjusting their formal citation forms of speech (Roach) to fast, fluent connected speech (Kelly). As communicative activities are often used in teaching, explicit strategies (Richards & Rodgers) are often needed to overcome their fixed phonological patterns. This article will suggest a combination of approaches to explicitly teach assimilation and elision by adapting traditional Audio-Lingual Methods (ALM). This lesson plan contains three separate stages to help learners move from mechanically correct speech to naturally fluent speech. During the pre-communicative stage learners will be trained with listening activities, drilling exercises and sentence transformation tasks. They will form automatic muscle memory through practice. Learners will then be given an un-scripted communicative task under time pressure to use the automatic strategies they have developed (Brown). During the post-communicative stage learners will reflect on their performance by listening to recording and using checklists. Using a combination of audio-lingual patterning with tasks means teachers can successfully provide B2 learners with automaticity to produce fluent, natural connected speech and improve listening skills.