1. Introduction

1.1 Need of the study

Small words are those special words which have features of adverbs and forms of prepositions. They are used to modify and complete the verbs in front of them, but they themselves alone cannot serve as the subjects, predicates, objects or any other sentence elements. Though they may have no concrete meanings in sentences, they are of great importance. They show various types of relationships in dialogs and it will be difficult for us to understand the context if we ignore those small words. It is frequently used in English as statistics show that among ten words which are most commonly used, three of them are small words. However, EFL learners have paid little attention to the use of small word in practicing their oral English.

It is pointed by Hasselgren (1998) that lexical chunks or discourse markers could be named #8220;Small words#8221; (short for SW) in EFL learners#8217; spoken English inter-language, stating that SW are a group of #8220;words and phrases, occurring with high frequency in the spoken language, that help to keep our speech flowing, yet do not contribute essentially to the message itself#8221; (Hasselgren, 155).

In recent years, small word is defined as the nonverbal item of certain so-called complex verbs which equals to the multi-word verb. Multi-word verb, put forward by Quirk (1972) and other experts, is a kind of phrase made up of verbs and Small words.

In this paper, I#8217;d like to define small words as Hasselgren explained.

As to the word #8220;fluency#8221;, Hartmann and Stork (1976) state that #8220;A person is said to be a fluent speaker of a language when he can use its structures accurately whilst concentrating on content rather than form, using the units and patterns automatically at normal conversational speed when they are needed#8221;. Brumfit (1984) thinks that fluency can #8220;be regarded as natural language use#8221;. He also points out that Fillmore#8217;s four fluency skills are related to four characteristics: speed and continuity, coherence, context-sensitivity, and creativity. There are many different explanations of fluency.

However, as far as I#8217;m concerned, a full explanation of fluency must include the following factors:

a) SR: speech rate

b) PTR: phonation/time ratio