Module teaching and integrating language skills lesson 1

Participate in a conversation.

How to Balance Accuracy and Fluency
With a clearer definition of accuracy and fluency, let's now look at how to effectively balance the two. Although some ideas and information has been briefly mentioned above, it proves important to now discuss the balance as a separate entity.
When the teacher develops a lesson, the early portions of the lesson generally get devoted to acquisition of the target language. Students need to learn the new material and produce it accurately. As a result, activities tend to be narrowly defined. This allows students to explicitly focus on one aspect of the target language. And as students become comfortable with the one aspect, then additional points and/or information can be added. Students don't need to juggle too much information.
Of course, as the students practice, the teacher shouldn't expect zero mistakes. No matter how much practice occurs, mistakes continue to occur. In addition, the teacher shouldn't restrict the lesson to controlled and repetitive activities. For example, if students drilled and drilled and drilled the language for the majority of the class, then everyone would quickly become bored. There would be little challenge, little engagement, little interest. Both the students and the teacher wouldn't offer careful thought to the lesson contents.
It should be noted that drills and controlled activities improve fluency too. Improved familiarity with the target language means an improved level of automaticity. This then translates to quicker and smoother response times.
However, as was mentioned earlier, fluency consists of more than quick responses to questions. Students must also be able to access and activate the knowledge. Students must be able to add detail for richer responses. Students must be able to participate in a conversation. Hence the latter portion of the lesson gets devoted to these other aspects for better fluency.
With increasingly open-ended activities, students must provide longer and more detailed answers. Students further mix grammar and vocabulary from past lessons. They also mix pre-existing knowledge gained from personal studies, interest, and exposure to English with the new material. All of this allows students to create more realistic and richer conversations, which they may also immediately apply outside the classroom.
Productive and Receptive Levels
Let's conclude with a brief word on productive and receptive levels, as both connect to accuracy and fluency. Productive and receptive levels can be defined as the following:
Productive Level: This refers to language use, specifically speaking and writing. 
Receptive Level: This refers to listening and reading, or input and comprehension.
For effective communication to occur, students must be able to produce and receive information. A poor productive level may mean that students have the information but can't speak quickly or correctly. On the other hand, students may try to dominate a conversation because of a poor receptive level. They speak and speak without actually participating in the conversation.
Attention to productive and receptive levels ties directly to accuracy, fluency, and the activities in this resource book. A teacher may correctly assume that students understand the target language, and thus ignore additional opportunities to improve language production. In other words, the teacher ignores activities for better accuracy and fluency simply because students understand the new material. An apt analogy would be assuming someone a capable driver after only a few sessions behind the wheel! Drills are needed to improve accuracy and response time.
Conversely, the teacher may spend too much time on drills and short activities that don't allow opportunities for rich and detailed use of the language. This results in a poorer receptive level because students don't have the chance to meaningfully interact with one another.
To conclude, the teacher must not only consider accuracy, fluency, and the balance of the two, but he must also consider both sides to language use. Focus too much on accuracy, and students are disengaged and unable to connect to the content. Focus too much on fluency, and students make so many mistakes that they cannot be clearly understood.