Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

1.2.3.3- The production stage

Since accuracy alone is not enough to achieve mastery of a new language, a third stage of grammar teaching is added – production, the aim of which is fluency (Thornbury, 1999). At this stage, students are somehow involved in activities that give them both the desire to communicate and a purpose which involves them in a varied use of the language. They will use the new grammatical structure in their own sentences in order to communicate with each other. They are supposed to be able to work without tight control now. Therefore, teacher will act as a monitor, adviser and encourager during the activities which should be placed in a meaningful and relevant context. The aim of production stage is fluency that means students’ ability to use the form and the rule they have just learnt in real communication. In the production stage, communication is of great importance. It is the stage where there should be a lot of communicative activities. Conditional sentences are therefore used for expressing suppositions and hypothesis like in real life situations.

The best and easiest way to have communicative activities in the production of conditional sentences is the integration of skills, better known as the integrated-skill approach. There are four major language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Numerous communicative situations in real life involve integrating two or more of the four language skills because one skill is rarely used in isolation in the actual language use (Cunningsworth , 1984). Therefore, teachers should also integrate two or more language skills in order to give a realistic context to the teaching of conditional sentences. It exposes language learners to authentic language and challenges them to communicate fluently in the language either in spoken or written form of communication.