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Date Posted: 00:15:41 06/13/07 Wed
Author: Andrea Faria (Argumentative essay)
Subject: Task 4

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Faculdade de Letras
Produção de Texto
Professor Adriana Tenuta
Student: Andréa Gomes de Faria


Task Four - Argumentative Essay


Looking for a balance between accuracy and fluency work


It is Monday and Joan wants to start her lesson asking her students what they did over the weekend. She has just taught them the past simple tense and wants to know whether they are using it appropriately. “What did you do at the weekend?”, she asks enthusiastically. Pedro answers, “I played football.” “Very nice!” responds Joan. “I goed to the hospital”, says Maria, and seeing her teacher’s strange look at her she decides to explain, “Yes, my father operated and almost dead.” Another strange look from the teacher, who decides to interrupt. “Go is an irregular verb. The past is went. Repeat, Maria. I went to the hospital.” And poor Maria repeats the sentence and gets an “excellent” as feedback. The teacher then moves on to the next students and finishes her warm-up with a quiz on the past simple of irregular verbs, totally oblivious of what has just happened. However strange it may seem, this scene is repeated over and over in many of our classes, even the ones in which teachers swear they use the latest ideas of Communicative Language Teaching. It shows how obsessed some teachers generally are with keeping to their carefully planned lessons that revolve around practising form and training students to apply rules. However, in some classes the pendulum swings only towards the opposite direction and while students are given plenty of opportunities to talk freely they barely get any feedback on their use of the language. No matter where we stand in this issue, concerning our teaching practice, we should try to find a balance between accuracy and fluency in our classes, keeping an eye on our students’ needs not only as learners of a language, but also as people who have something to say.
Few things are more rewarding in a language lesson than having students succeed in expressing their ideas, needs and beliefs. And this may be very difficult for some, not only due to lack of command of the language, but also for fear of exposing themselves. When we want students to speak freely we should make an effort to try to listen for content and control our anxiety to correct them, just as we normally do when talking to someone in our own language. If Joan, in the story above, had been interested in listening to what her students really had to tell about their weekend, she would have paid attention to Maria and been able to sympathise with her, instead of worrying about getting her past simple right. As Julian Edge states in her book Mistakes and correction, “… the importance of mistakes is that they should often be ignored. Students need the experience of being listened to as people with things to say.” (20) If we are working on improving fluency, it is only when mistakes interfere in the understanding of ideas that they should be a concern. When this happens in normal conversation, we generally stop our interlocutors and engage in a process of negotiating meaning, until ideas are clarified and the conversation can proceed. In class, we can do the same and stimulate our students to do the same with one another. It is as simple as stating that you cannot understand what the other person is trying to say or asking the person to try to say the same thing in other words. At the end of this kind of activities, teachers should always give students some feedback on their ability to express meaning, as well as comment on elements that made understanding difficult, such as grammar mistakes, pronunciation problems, use of expressions translated from L1 into L2 and which can cause problems of understanding for speakers of a different language than the students’ mother tongue.
Teachers of the “Communicative Language Teaching generation” may imagine that anything goes as long as communication is flowing. However, matters are not as simple as that. The problem is not the CLT approach at all, but on certain misconceptions concerning communicative competence. Grammatical or linguistic competence, which is the ability to use the basic elements of communication, such as sentence patterns, lexical resources and the phonological system, is one of the competences we should acquire in order to be competent “communicators”. Therefore, accuracy is also important, because it helps us give a better shape to the ideas we want to express. Thus, efficient and successful communication is dependent on a certain amount of accuracy. Besides this, students need English for several different reasons and some of them, as passing exams, finding a good job, getting a promotion, will certainly demand a good mastery of the standard variety of the language, in its three aspects -- form, meaning and use. To help us deal with accuracy in a balanced way in our classes a good idea may be to begin by telling our students our intention. Secondly, we can introduce work on form in controlled practice exercises, after presenting a new language item. As they are less communicative and demand less attention to meaning, students can concentrate more on form and repetition of patterns, familiarizing themselves with new structures, before they move on to less controlled practice and freer expression. In this stage teachers should encourage self and peer-correction whenever possible. They stimulate autonomy and cooperation and get students engaged in listening to the language and reflecting upon it. According to Edge, “The more students are involved in correction, the more they have to think about the language used.” (27)
In conclusion, fluency and accuracy are both important goals in the process of learning a language and should be addressed in class in a balanced way. There are occasions in which we must refrain from correcting mistakes that do not impair communication and there are others in which we should ask our students to be as precise in their use of forms as possible. Nevertheless, nothing is more important than acknowledging our students’ attempts to communicate their ideas, values and feelings and giving them credit for their accomplishments in the use of the language, as part of their learning process. After all, it makes no sense to us or our students to speak fluently and accurately, but be unable to express what we want.

REFERENCES
EDGE, Julian. Mistakes and corrections. New York: Longman. 1989. 70 p.

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