Since its creation in 1988, the IPCC has taken increasing care to formalise its procedures. IPCC procedures define the creation and role of the IPCC Bureau, Task Forces and Working Groups, as well as the steps that must be taken by experts when preparing reports, and by administrators for overseeing the institution’s funding. Increasingly detailed over time and now running over several dozen pages, the IPCC procedures are not a boring part of IPCC studies. They are key observation points of the main issues that the IPCC has had to address over time. They reflect the compromises it has made in its efforts to give the greatest political efficiency to its reports, while ensuring that their scientific robustness remains irreproachable. The procedures therefore constitute a site from which many of the issues addressed in this book can be read. However, they should not be taken as descriptions of actual practices: their implementation is open to interpretation and thereby to debate. The drafting and amendment of procedures therefore remains an open process.

The chapter focuses on psycholinguistic perspectives of temporal evaluations of fluency, based on skill development, usually comparing L2 fluency to smooth, automatic processes used by native speakers in conceptualising, formulating and articulating speech. We aruge this deficit model of L2 speech is limited, and needs to move to a more dynamic bilingual contextualised view of fluency. We evaluate Segalowitz’s multicomponent model of cognitive fluency, utterance fluency and perceptions of fluency, and current analyses of utterance fluency, in terms of speech rate, breakdown and disfluency, noting how speed, silence and repair may be rated as both negative and positive aspects of fluency. We emphasise the interdependence of individual speech processes across both L1 and L2, the relationship between fluency and different linguistic domains (particularly vocabulary and the role of formulaic sequences or multiword expressions). The chapter also discusses individual differences and psycho-social factors, such as working memory, personality traits, willingness to engage in interaction or not. Also noted are more interactional context-based views of fluency, fluency strategies and perceptions of fluency.