Telegraphic speech is not a phenomenon observed only in second language adults. In fact, it is a developmental stage observed in first language children, too. The question is not about how we can foster brain automaticity (not to mention the term 'brain automaticity' itself is not clearly defined) but more about how you can provide comprehensible input in a way the input can lead to uptake.

Jose, you wrote: “older students in beginning levels tend to speak English using disconnected sentences”. This is no wonder, given that disconnected bits and pieces of their new language is what textbooks present beginner (and advanced!) learners with. In writing, to top it all. You cannot learn to speak from printed input.

Spoken languages rely on prosody, something which is not dealt with in most teaching materials – even in those courses where segmental pronunciation may be included, usually offered as descriptive attributes of *individual* vowels and consonants. You cannot learn to speak by joining together isolated sounds either: in real-life speech, features of “individual” sounds merge together.

One way to foster fluency is to start by exposing beginner learners to the “music” of their new languages. Prosody is the backbone of segmental pronunciation: in English, for example, it stands for its so-called “syllable-timing” and associated “vowel reductions”. Once you get the prosody right, fluency follows.

Have a look at these two posts of mine, at my blog _Being Multilingual_:

‘Unconnected speech?’, http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2012/09/unconnected-speech.html

‘Learning to speak in tune’, http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/2011/05/learning-to-speak-in-tune.html

Madalena

By elder do you mean elderly? The word "elder" has advanced from being 40+ 2000 years ago to something more like 70+ today (don't dare call someone younger than that elderly). For our work with the elderly, including those with early onset dementia, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, etc. our focus is on support and remediation of memory explicitly, as well as maintenance of engagement in everyday physical and social activities, including in particular conversation about current events and games.

By older, do you mean older than the infant (0-5) age group for whom language learning seems so natural and easy? Viz. school age or university level students? At this age group for language learning/teaching our aim is actually much the same, to immerse them in everyday activities, physical, mental and social. But it is essential that these activities provide good models, and that means a preponderance of true native speaker utterance. This can really only be achieved by exchanges or intensive mode teaching the target language region, and is not even provided by schools that carry out all instruction in the target language - e.g. our German years 1-13 schools for children from German background in Australia do not at the end deliver speakers with native competence. Their social lives are still lived in English.

This group is in fact the initial target for our computational interventions that provide "native speaker" characters (peers, teachers and opponents) in language exercises and games, with far greater flexibility than is allowed by a non-native teacher playing the occasional DVD, although currently computer voices still need considerable improvement to be considered native speakers, especially for languages other than (American) English where far less investment/development has gone into the voices, speaker and language models. Currently the focus is on grammar and vocabulary (which seems also to be the focus of your question), but as the technology improves we will have greater focus on phonology, tonology and prosody - stress and tone are very much the neglected aspects in language teaching, and precise microphonology is also hard to deliver well (and are important to being able to engage in conversation, understand the surface content fluently and pick up all the nuances - even for European languages, and absolutely essential as we move away from the European sound systems and encounter tones and other exotic phonemic features).

I think the term "automaticity " is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to being able to respond to questions or speak their mind quickly (I don't mean speak quickly, I mean the process of understanding, gathering thoughts, and presenting those thoughts to the receiver). I have been reading a little about semantic networks and how they can be utilized to create depth and breadth of knowledge in a new word. I think we should be giving them a real understanding of how and when to use a word so that they do not get stuck trying to reason out what they would like to say. I have put forth some "tips" that were published in TESOL Connections (link: http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolc/issues/2012-12-01/index.html) that have received some favorable responses from those who read it. I must reiterate that I have read "a little" on these processes in the brain and while I am combining it with what I know with the experiences I have had in the classroom, this in no way makes me an "expert" on the brain or how it stores vocabulary. But I firmly believe that once a student can have the depth and breadth of knowledge about a word, it is much easier to recall and use in the correct situations in the future. I have witnessed this in my own classrooms after implementing these considerations for my students with a list of 10 "difficult" words (I'm currently writing up the results of my action research and hope to publish later this year or next year). Anyway, as automacitiy goes, whatever we do to help them make the language we teach them "real" to their own world will go a long way to helping them use it in a more natural way.

I also agree with Madalena that prosody is also important to gain "fluency" but if they are struggling to choose the correct words (something that happens to low, intermediate, and high English students due to the very nature of a satellite framed language) they will never be able to sound fluent because they will have to pause to think of a correct term.

James

@James I agree that lexicon is a critical impediment to language and fluency, but only up to a certain point, and we should be training our students NOT to stop and try to think of the precise word they want, but actually keep going and explain the concept. Even in our native language we often tompt - that is have a word on the "Tip Of My Tongue" that we can't quite remember (often we will think we know the first letter, and mostly we will be right or close within one phonetic feature - e.g. we said /b/ but it was /p/). This doesn't make us disfluent. We actually talk about the problem, then work around it.

Going in country and just using the language you can get very adept at working around holes in vocab, and everyone has holes in their vocab, and every word in your native language had an associated hole at one point - but as children we still managed to express ourselves.

In class practice in impromptu, unrehearsed scenarios, with an emphasis on getting the idea across rather than using the right word and grammar, can be used to build this important circumlocution skill, and to practice operating in the language rather than translating into the language.

@David Good points. I also think circumlocution is very important, so much so that I teach it in my University courses.

As for impromptu situations, I usually let the students create the scenarios in class so that they are in line with their lives (in accordance to the subject matter being taught) and when they can't use the words they want, then circumlocutory methods are called for! Thanks for the ideas and I think I will try planning "pop situations" for the students next academic year and see how that goes.

I think by informing them about the connected speech and liaison, they can cope with this telegraphic speech. Providing authentic audio-visual materials through multimedia can also be of great help.

I take the original question as focusing on ways to help older (I'm not sure how old) second language learners become more fluent (automatic) in spoken English. The issue of developing the lexicon has been brought up and the "tip of the tongue" issue. I'm sure we all know the experience of knowing we know the word we want, but being unable to access it at a given moment. Anyone who has spent time trying to live and work in a foreign language knows that this is especially true when we are learning to communicate in a second language. In my own experience, I can watch a movie in French or Spanish, and follow quite well. However, I would struggle greatly to produce sentences containing the same words that I can recognize.

So one part of the task to help second language learners of any age is not only to develop their vocabulary - but also their quick access to that vocabulary in the correct grammatical forms for a give sentence. For example, if I know the word "photograph" but the sentence I am speaking requires the word "photography" the pronunciation shift in these related words could easily fill up the working memory so that the ability to access the correct version of that word gets blocked. Each impediment to accessing a word can build frustration, and lack of ability to put our cognitive resources to efficient use.

The question is about oral language with older second language learners. My own research and practical expertise is in literacy instruction with children (often in international schools where ESL is a major issue). Despite that distinction, it is my experience that instruction which helps learners see how the written structures of English work to represent meaning and provide cues between related words is a rich way of deepening and expanding vocabulary in the way that would faciltiate the automaticity that is being sought by the questioner. A key part the structured word inquiry instruction that I support in schools is to help teachers and students learn how to investigate the morphological interrelationships of words. For example, when we encounter the word "sign" and are curious about the presence of the "g" we look for words with a connected spelling and meaning. Such an investigation can lead to a large set of words related in meaning and structure, but not necessarily pronunciation (e.g., signal, signature, signify, design, designate, resign, resignation). By investigating the spelling structure of words, we collect a set of vocabularly words that have an underlying connection in meaning. Teachers and students can thus study the similarities and differences in the meanings of such words, and how they are pronounced. In this way we build not only the lexicon, but we do so in a way that is organized according to the structural conventions of the language. From priming studies we know that morphology is a key feature to how the lexicon is organized, and of how we access words. Rastle and Davis (2008) argued that morpho-orthographic segmentation gained through multiple exposures to the oral and written (lexical and sub-lexical) forms of words and the associated semantic information, contributes "to the efficiency of speeded reading, particularly for users of morphologically rich languages. Thus, teaching methods that enhance morpho-orthographic segmentation should be favoured in school classrooms" (p. 967).

There are many videos of this typoe of morphological instruction in action in classrooms around the world at this YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/user/WordWorksKingston?feature=mhee

My website for teachers at www.wordworkskinston.com is full of free resources and examples of this work in action.

This Grade 5 blog from a class in Zurich shows the kind of engagement and detail even young children can do with this work: http://blogs.zis.ch/dallen/category/languagespellingword-study/

The morphological intervention study (Bowers & KIrby, 2010) using a structured word inquiry approach that showed generative vocabularly learning through this instruction at this link: http://wordworkskingston.com/WordWorks/Pete_Bowers_Research_files/published%20vocab%20paper.pdf

I hope that is helpful.

Well, I can see that you are all experts in teaching languages. As a non-expert in the area but had been in a situation where I had to learn a language to survive, I would like to share with you, especially Jose, my language learning experience.

First of all, I speak, think, and write in English as if it is my first language but Filipino is actually my first language and two other dialects in the Philippines. So when I went to Japan on a fellowship, I was thrown in a world where 99.99% of the people did not speak any other language than their own. Hence, I had to learn to speak their language.

The first faculty (who was older, maybe in her mid to late 50's) I had, implemented an approach in the classroom that was either swim or sink. She refused to speak any English at all. She used actions and drawings to convey her message. Some of the students in my class (of less than 20 students) were catching up with her style but I was falling off fast. Later, I learned that those who were catching up had some lessons outside the classroom several months back; I on the other hand had no lessons at all. I got so frustrated, I asked to be transferred to a younger faculty after three weeks.

The younger faculty translated the directions and taught the translations of the words and the sentences. It was a bliss! I could speak in broken sentences. After two months, I had more vocabulary and was speaking more although in broken sentences since I was at the level of a small child at that point. The months went by and after I had completed the six month course, I had the confidence to talk and discuss easy day to day topics including the news on TV using full sentences, albeit with grammatical and pronunciation mistakes. To make my story short, it takes building up a vocabulary and understanding of the grammar behind a new language to be able to speak it automatically. To date, 20 years after my education in Japan, I can still talk their language not without a struggle though because I seldom have the chance to speak it.

There is obviously a need to inventory the types of older learners we are referring to first (L2, L3 and L4 learners are all very different) and--as one writer above noted--need to know motivation and context of these learners.

When I began teaching EFL in Germany in 1986, I had 60, 50, 40, 30 and 20 year olds in the same classroom. Some had taken or retaken classes before with some of the same classmates. They also came from all kinds of working backgrounds and educational training. However, they had built great rapport amongst themselves over time and saw language learning as no more than an activity like learning to sew or learning to drive a car.

So, expectations of automatization made it easier for the groups of students to carry on and to motivate one another. Some would choose to retake the level even though they were eligible to move up.

In short, motivating, having high standards, and having fun in the classroom are key for older learners of all ages.

An approach I have taken that has worked well is to: 1) write a short story (a few pages long) in English that pertain to the students area of interest; 2) record and distribute my narations of the stories; 3) distribute a vocabulary list of aout 2/3 of the new vocabulary with the translations IN THE CONTEXT of the short story; have the students practice their pronunciation and their oral translations of segments of the short story; 3) review their progress prmptly at each step; 4) assign exercises that use the new vocabulary and grammatical forms IN CONTEXT; 5) assign exercises that use the vocabulary and grammatical forms in DIFFERENT, but familar contexts; 6) assign written translation exercises; 7) assign exercises for them to express their personal reaction to the characters or the situations.

When we have finished working on the short story, review all the new material and give them a test on their pronunciation, their mastery of the vocabulary and grammar , their oral translations, and their written translations, as well as their personal feelings about the story.

It is a lot of work, but the results are excellent. Most importantly, the students are prepared to cope with situations in which they need to use CONTEXT to fill in the blanks presented by unfamiliar vocabulary.

Getting back to the matter of prosody and language noted above, I feel that good definitions are needed for discussants to comprehend what is being referred to.

Here are notes on Prosody: (I apologize for using Wikileaks as source--I am going home now)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29

In linguistics, prosody (pronounced /ˈprɒsədi/ PROSS-ə-dee, from Greek προσῳδία, prosōidía, [prosɔːdía], "song sung to music; pronunciation of syllable") is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance (statement, question, or command); the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of language that may not be encoded by grammar or choice of vocabulary.

Contents

1 Classification

2 Acoustic attributes

3 Domain

4 Emotion

5 Brain regions involved

6 See also

7 References

8 Further reading

9 External links

Classification

Languages can be classified according to the distinctive prosodic unit that gives a language its rhythm. Languages can be stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed. Stress-timed languages include English and Dutch, syllable-timed languages include Spanish and Italian, and an example of a mora-timed language is Japanese. The classification of languages is done under the assumption that a language has “isochronous rhythm,"[1] meaning that there is an equal amount of time between stressed syllables, syllables, or moras, depending on the category of language.

Acoustic attributes

In terms of acoustics, the prosodics of oral languages involve variation in syllable length, loudness and pitch. In sign languages, prosody involves the rhythm, length, and tension of gestures, along with mouthing and facial expressions. Prosody is typically absent in writing, which can occasionally result in reader misunderstanding. Orthographic conventions to mark or substitute for prosody include punctuation (commas, exclamation marks, question marks, scare quotes, and ellipses), and typographic styling for emphasis (italic, bold, and underlined text).

The details of a language's prosody depend upon its phonology. For instance, in a language with phonemic vowel length, this must be marked separately from prosodic syllable length. In similar manner, prosodic pitch must not obscure tone in a tone language if the result is to be intelligible. Although tone languages such as Mandarin have prosodic pitch variations in the course of a sentence, such variations are long and smooth contours, on which the short and sharp lexical tones are superimposed. If pitch can be compared to ocean waves, the swells are the prosody, and the wind-blown ripples in their surface are the lexical tones, as with stress in English. The word dessert has greater stress on the second syllable, compared to the noun desert, which has greater stress on the first (in its "arid land" meaning, but not in its "thing which is deserved" meaning); but this distinction is not obscured when the entire word is stressed by a child demanding "Give me dessert!" Vowels in many languages are likewise pronounced differently (typically less centrally) in a careful rhythm or when a word is emphasized, but not so much as to overlap with the formant structure of a different vowel. Both lexical and prosodic information are encoded in rhythm, loudness, pitch, and vowel formants.

Domain

Prosodic features are suprasegmental. They are not confined to any one segment, but occur in some higher level of an utterance. These prosodic units are the actual phonetic "spurts", or chunks of speech. They need not correspond to grammatical units such as phrases and clauses, though they may; and these facts suggest insights into how the brain processes speech.

Prosodic units are marked by phonetic cues. Phonetic cues can include aspects of prosody such as pitch, pauses, and accents, all of which are cues that must be analyzed in context, or in comparison to other aspects of a sentence. Pitch, for example, can change over the course of a sentence. In English, falling intonation indicates a declarative statement while rising intonation indicates an interrogative statement. Pauses are important prosodic units because they can often indicate breaks in a thought and can also sometimes indicate the intended grouping of nouns in a list. Breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, seems to occur only at these pauses where the prosody resets. Prosodic units, along with function words and punctuation, help to mark clause boundaries in speech. Accents, meanwhile, help to distinguish certain aspects of a sentence that may require more attention. English often utilizes a pitch accent, or an emphasis on the final word of a sentence. Focus accents serve to emphasize a word in a sentence that requires more attention, such as if that word specifically is intended to be a response to a question.[1]

"Prosodic structure" is important in language contact and lexical borrowing. For example, in Modern Hebrew, the XiXéX verb-template is much more productive than the XaXáX verb-template because in morphemic adaptations of non-Hebrew stems, the XiXéX verb-template is more likely to retain – in all conjugations throughout the tenses – the prosodic structure (e.g., the consonant clusters and the location of the vowels) of the stem.[2]

Unique prosodic features have been noted in infant-directed speech (IDS) - also known as baby talk, child-directed speech (CDS), or motherese. Adults, especially caregivers, speaking to young children tend to imitate childlike speech by using higher and more variable pitch, as well as an exaggerated stress. These prosodic characteristics are thought to assist children in acquiring phonemes, segmenting words, and recognizing phrasal boundaries. And though there is no evidence to indicate that infant-directed speech is necessary for language acquisition, these specific prosodic features have been observed in many different languages.[3]

Prosody is useful for listeners as they perform sentence parsing. Prosody helps resolve sentence ambiguity. For example, the sentence: “They invited Bob and Bill and Al got rejected,” is ambiguous when written.[1] But when the sentence is read aloud, prosodic cues like pauses and changes in intonation will make the meaning clear. The prosody of an ambiguous sentence biases a listener’s interpretation of that sentence.[1] Moving the intonational boundary in the above example will change the interpretation of the sentence. This result has been found in studies performed in both English and Bulgarian.[4]

Prosody is also useful in expressing (for speakers) and detecting (for listeners) sarcasm. The most useful prosodic feature in detecting sarcasm is a reduction in the mean fundamental frequency relative to other speech for humor, neutrality, or sincerity. While prosodic cues are important in indicating sarcasm, context clues and shared knowledge are also important.[5]

Emotion

Main article: emotional prosody

Emotional prosody is the expression of feelings using prosodic elements of speech. It was considered by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man to predate the evolution of human language: "Even monkeys express strong feelings in different tones – anger and impatience by low, – fear and pain by high notes."[6] Native speakers listening to actors reading emotionally neutral text while projecting emotions correctly recognized happiness 62% of the time, anger 95%, surprise 91%, sadness 81%, and neutral tone 76%. When a database of this speech was processed by computer, segmental features allowed better than 90% recognition of happiness and anger, while suprasegmental prosodic features allowed only 44%–49% recognition. The reverse was true for surprise, which was recognized only 69% of the time by segmental features and 96% of the time by suprasegmental prosody.[7] In typical conversation (no actor voice involved), the recognition of emotion may be quite low, of the order of 50%, hampering the complex interrelationship function of speech advocated by some authors.[8] That said, even if emotional expression through prosody cannot always be consciously recognized, tone of voice may continue to have subconscious effects in conversation. This sort of expression stems from not linguistic or semantic effects, and can thus be isolated from traditional linguistic content. Aptitude of the average person to decode conversational implicature of emotional prosody has been found to be slightly less accurate than traditional facial expression discrimination ability;however, specific ability to decode varies by emotion. These emotional have been determined to be ubiquitous across cultures, as they are utilized and understood across cultures. Various emotions, and their general experimental identification rates, are as follows:[9]

Anger and Sadness: High rate of accurate identification

Fear and Happiness: Medium rate of accurate identification

Disgust: Poor rate of accurate identification

The prosody of an utterance is used by listeners to guide decisions about the emotional affect of the situation. Whether a person decodes the prosody as positive, negative, or neutral plays a factor in the way a person decodes a facial expression accompanying an utterance. As the facial expression becomes closer to neutral, the prosodic interpretation influences the interpretation of the facial expression. A study by Marc D. Pell revealed that 600 ms of prosodic information is necessary for listeners to be able to identify the affective tone of the utterance. At lengths below this, there was not enough information for listeners to process the emotional context of the utterance.[10]

An aprosodia is an acquired or developmental impairment in comprehending or generating the emotion conveyed in spoken language. Aprosody is often accompanied by the inability to properly utilize variations in speech, particularly with deficits in ability to accurately modulate pitch, loudness, intonation, and rhythm of word formation.[11] This is seen sometimes in persons with Asperger syndrome.[12]

Brain regions involved

Producing these nonverbal elements requires intact motor areas of the face, mouth, tongue, and throat. This area is associated with Brodmann areas 44 and 45 (Broca's area) of the left frontal lobe. Damage to areas 44/45 produces motor aprosodia, with the nonverbal elements of speech being disturbed (facial expression, tone, rhythm of voice).

Understanding these nonverbal elements requires an intact and properly functioning right-hemisphere perisylvian area, particularly Brodmann area 22 (not to be confused with the corresponding area in the left hemisphere, which contains Wernicke's area).[13] Damage to the right inferior frontal gyrus causes a diminished ability to convey emotion or emphasis by voice or gesture, and damage to right superior temporal gyrus causes problems comprehending emotion or emphasis in the voice or gestures of others. The right Brodmann area 22 aids in the interpretation of prosody, and damage causes sensory aprosodia, with the patient unable to comprehend changes in voice and body language.