Theme: designing discussion activities and distinguishing fluency and accuracy activities

Evaluating the discussion

Ask students to write a one-minute paper. You can ask students to write about how their thinking changed as a result of the discussion or how the discussion fits into the context of issues previously discussed. Have students hand in their papers and review samples to assess what they have learned. Ask students to respond to specific questions about the discussion. Was the topic defined effectively? Did the facilitator keep the discussion on track? Did everyone have the opportunity to speak? Was your participation invited and encouraged? What questions related to the discussion remain unanswered? In what ways could the discussion have been improved? You might also use a more formal questionnaire and have students rate these various aspects of the discussion. Conduct your own informal evaluation of the discussion. Consider the following questions when making your evaluation: Did everyone contribute to the discussion? How much was I, as the facilitator, involved? Did the discussion stay focused? What questions worked especially well? How satisfied did the group seem about the productiveness of the discussion? What would I do differently next time?³

1.2. Distinguishing fluency and accuracy activities
In everyday usage, fluent is often used interchangeably with proficient, as in, He’s pretty fluent in Arabic. But in language teaching, fluency is a bit more technical and just one component of language proficiency, often discussed in tandem with accuracy: Some learners speak very fluently, but their speech may be riddled with errors. Conversely, some learners speak haltingly but with a great deal of accuracy. Generally, accuracy is the complement to fluency, and most classroom activities focus on either accuracy or fluency. More importantly, I can tell you that before I learned about fluency activities, virtually all of the activities I was doing in class were working on accuracy. I’m going to discuss the characteristics of accuracy and fluency activities and provide examples that you can easily try with your adult learners. It’s worth mentioning that we can’t really focus on both accuracy and fluency at the same time. During accuracy-focused activity, it is the role of the teacher to correct students, model native-like forms, help students to notice the gap, and so on. When we’re building fluency, though, we need to shut all that off. No correcting or interrupting. Our role is to encourage and support rapid speech, to lower inhibitions and anxiety related to making mistakes.
Accuracy
First, order of operations: it’s a good general rule that accuracy activities come before fluency activities. And when you think about it, this is common sense. You don’t want to be building fluency with incorrect forms. First you want to get it right; then you want to speed it up. When we talk about accuracy, we’re trying to raise our students’ awareness of form and forms, to draw their attention to the details of how we use a new vocabulary item, construct a grammatical form, pronounce a word. We model, we repeat, we give feedback.
Fluency
In my experience, students and often materials tend to be overly focused on accuracy, paying too little attention to actively building fluency. So when we talk about maintaining a balance between fluency and accuracy, what we really mean is making sure we dedicate some time to fluency. Your mileage may vary, though, so adjust your approach accordingly.
Paul Nation suggests that the following conditions be provided for effective fluency activities:

1. 
   All language items involved are already familiar to students,
   
2. 
   The focus is on communication not form in real time, and
   
3. 
   Supports are in place for students to outperform their normal proficiency
   

Let’s look at an example of a fluency activity to get a better sense of what they look like. Once you know what makes a good fluency exercise, they’re really easy to develop. This one could work with intermediate students:

1. 
   Students spend 5–10 minutes preparing a 3-minute spoken description of their dream house. They may make notes but should not be reading from a script.
   
2. 
   Place students in pairs and have them exchange descriptions.
   
3. 
   Now shuffle the partners, and ask students to deliver the same description, but in 2.5 minutes.
   
4. 
   Shuffle again, and give them 2 minutes.
   

In an exercise like this, students get the chance to work out the meaning and language the first time through. In the subsequent recitations, they will be more confident with their words, and under greater time constraints. Thus, we meet all of Nation’s conditions.
Other activities that build fluency in other skills could be free writing, extensive reading, and authentic listening without subtitles. Personally, when it comes to grammar and vocabulary, I try to set a trajectory not only from accuracy to fluency, but also from written to spoken production. Writing is a deliberate, recursive process. It gives students time to carefully consider the new form, work from models, work out the details, catch their own mistakes, and get visual feedback from teachers. Then, we move on to spoken exercises, where the pressure is on a little, and things need to occur in real time. Knowing a language is not merely knowing the grammatical rules but also knowing when to say what and to whom, that is knowledge of how the system is put to use in the performing of social actions of different kinds. Accuracy and fluency are the two factors which determine the success of English language students in the future. It is a general problem faced by language teachers today, whether to focus on accuracy or fluency. Accuracy refers to the ability of the learner to produce grammatically correct sentences. The learner should not only know correct grammatical rules of the language but also able to speak and write accurately. Fluency refers to a level of proficiency in communication. It is the ability to produce written and spoken sentences with ease, efficiency, without pauses or a breakdown of communication. Generally language teachers have to deal with heterogeneous students having different language background and language skills, different world views, age levels, experiences and point of view. Some students are accurate in speaking and writing but hesitate to speak in public. On the other hand, few students are fluent but not accurate. Every student wants to be accurate as well as fluent in speaking and writing. But there are many variables and kinds of learner and differences in classroom that makes teaching sometimes very challenging and interesting. It is a general problem with language teachers that they prefer focusing on grammar activity than on speaking activity. They believe that to learn a second language, grammar is the most important thing to learn first. But if we see how a child does learns his mother tongue or L1. We find that he learns simple words or sentences first by listening or repeating in different contexts. Eventually he starts speaking fluently at the age of three or four; he is able to express most of the things relating with the area of his /her knowledge without knowing the rules of grammar. She/he starts learning the rules of grammar when he enters in class 2 or3. We have to make a balance between accuracy and fluency. In reality accuracy and fluency are closely related, which leads to the notion that accuracy as well as fluency is necessary for successful communication. As language teachers and learners, we should be able to explore along with our students not only grammar of forms but also grammar of functions. A grammar of forms makes us familiar with the grammatical structures and rules designed to show how the systems and subsystems of a language work. But a grammar of function puts together the grammatical structures of a language and how these can be used by a variety of people in a variety of situations for interpersonal and organisational communication. Main thing is that we should provide them natural atmosphere or we should immerse them in the atmosphere so that they should speak naturally or not feel that they are doing something different. For this group discussion, mock-interview, role play, simulation, research paper presentation in seminars and conferences, debate and speech activities can be better option. In our language classes we go through many activities to develop accuracy and fluency in reading, writing, listening and speaking. Brumfit distinguishes between these two activities, “extensive reading is aimed at fluency but much intensive reading work is aimed at accuracy; free and situational writing exercises are aimed at fluency but all controlled and much guided writing is aimed at accuracy; listening exercises are aimed at accuracy but casual listening in the classroom has a major role as a fluency activity.” The learner is the most important person in the classroom. However, the learner loses his importance in the teacher‟s anxiety to complete his syllabus or a lesson plan. Every teacher is concerned about the students‟ progress or welfare but unconsciously his personality dominates and the class becomes teachers centred. The learner centred class treats students as a “tabula rasa” or a clear slate to be worked over and changed by new knowledge.⁴ The teacher becomes a guide or felicitator who promotes decision making and learner autonomy in the class. The learner centred teacher should focus on the following things in the class: a. Communication in natural and meaningful atmosphere. b. Integration of skills. c. Real life authentic material. d. Learning by doing. e. Class organisation- individual. f. Focus on meaning. g. Learner involvement. h. Teacher as felicitator. i. Extending language use beyond the class. j. Focus on using the language. k. Focus on the process as oppose to product. Fluency based activities need to be introduced in the language classes and learners involvement should be increased. The teacher should motivate and create tasks for the language skills like reading, writing, listening and speaking and let them free to express themselves in natural classroom situation. To quote Johnson, “The first most central, and by now most generally acceptable implications of the nature of these processes, is that they can only be practised in a language teaching which is task-oriented. The second implication of these tasks and activities is the concept of information. In all types of language activities, the purpose of interaction is to convey information. In order to make a conversation interesting there should be an element of doubt and information gap activities. In a second language classroom students should be free to choose what they say within “real time”. The concept of selection or the freedom of expression is the basic to the process of fluent communication. The forth implication is to match what happens outside the classroom with the activities within the classroom. Outside the classroom the students constantly and spontaneously interact. They are not stopped when they mix two languages or two forms. But in the classroom teachers can monitor their own speech acts, and the speech act of their students. Sometimes we go to the extremes and an over emphasis on fluent language activity may result in errors which are caused by several different processes. These include: a. Interlanguage is the type of language produced by second and foreign language learners who are in the process of learning a language. Two types of transfer may occur. Negative transfer is the use of L1pattern or rule which leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language . Positive transfer which makes learning easier and it occurs when both the native language and the target language have the same form. For example, French and English. b. Overgeneralization-when a learner extends the use of a grammatical rule beyond its accepted uses. For example, use of mans instead of men. c. Communication strategy — it is a way used to express a meaning in the first language, the second or foreign language by a learner who has limited command of the language. d. Fossilization is a process which sometimes occurs in which incorrect linguistic features become a permanent part of the way a person speaks or writes a language. Aspects of pronunciation, vocabulary usage and grammar can be fossilized. Errors can be made by the learners due to many reasons but errors should be taken as significant evidence of development and learning. Teachers should not over emphasize on accuracy and fluency because learners can lose their confidence. To conclude, accuracy and fluency both are the important factors for learning any language. And in the case of second language there should be gradual shift from fluency based activities to accuracy based activities. A language teacher should try to make his/her classes learner centred, every activity should be contextual and task-oriented and focus should be more on fluency first then an accuracy as in case we learn our first language. Fluency practice can be contrasted with accuracy practice, which focuses on creating correct examples of language use. Differences between activities that focus on accuracy and fluency can be summarized. Teachers are recommended to use a balance of fluency activities and accuracy and to use accuracy activities to support fluency activities . Accuracy work could either come before or after fluency work. For example, based on students‟ performance on a fluency task, the teacher could assign accuracy work to deal grammatical or pronunciation problems the teacher observed while students were carrying out the task. The reason for this is the ultimate goal of learning is to be able to use the new language both accurately and fluently. English‏‎ is an international language which people from all over the world learn in order to communicate with each other. Accuracy and Fluency are two factors which can determine the success of English language students in the future. Essentially accuracy is the ability to produce correct sentences using correct grammar‏‎ and vocabulary‏‎. On the other hand, fluency is the ability to produce‏‎ language easily and smoothly.
Accuracy
Accuracy is relative. A very young child isn’t capable of the same level of accuracy as an adult. The child will make mistakes and misuse vocabulary.
Teachers who concentrate on accuracy help their students to produce grammatically correct written and spoken English, ideally aiming towards the accuracy of a native speaker of similar age and background.
The emphasis in the classroom will be on grammar presentations and exercises, reading comprehension‏‎ and suchlike.
Fluency
A fluent speaker, on the other hand, may well make grammatical errors but will speak or write efficiently without pauses. They will be able to converse freely and talk with native-speakers about many different subjects.
Fluency generally increases as learners progress and become more comfortable using the language.
Language teachers who concentrate on fluency help their students to express themselves in English. They pay more attention to meaning and context and are less concerned with grammatical errors. Typical fluency activities are role playing and more communicative activities where English is used as a medium of communication rather than an end in itself.
Accuracy vs Fluency
Taken as a given that students’ needs should always dictate what you teach them, the question of whether it is more important to work on accuracy or fluency in the language classroom remains. Many teachers believe that fluency is a goal worth striving towards only with students who are at a fairly advanced level. Other teachers, strong in the belief that the learning of a language is about communication, feel that fluency should be the main goal in their teaching and that it should be practiced right from the start. More traditional teachers tend to give accuracy greater importance; more liberal teachers tend towards fluency.
Often a rigid educational system where tests and exams are the focus, will have students and their traditional teachers believe that language accuracy is what matters most, and giving the “correct” answers often becomes an obsession. Students who have been taught this way can complete any grammar gap-fill you care to give them, but will struggle to order a coffee in a real English speaking situation. On the other hand, a more communicative approach will produce students who can converse at length on almost any subject but could well make horrendous spelling and grammatical mistakes in their writing.
In the end, however, it really boils down to the the needs of the student.
Methodologies in Practice
As far as teaching methodologies are concerned, very broadly speaking the communicative approach is the one that favours fluency the most, while the audio-lingual and grammar-translation‏‎ approaches favour accuracy.
Typically, at beginner level when the students don’t have enough language to worry about fluency, teachers tend to focus on accuracy.
This carries on through to pre-intermediate when fluency activities like discussions and debates are introduced. Later, when the students are reasonably independent language users, a mix of accuracy and fluency is used, with the focus shifting to fluency as students advance. One important point to bear in mind, however, is that too much bias one way or another is not good. Accuracy without fluency is not useful in the same way that fluency without accuracy is also not useful. A good mixture – biased towards the needs of the student – is the ideal way to go.⁵
Tests and Exams
Excelling in tests represents but a small part of language competence and a lot of students’ needs relate to performing in situations that are non-exam focused.