Anna Kirakosyan

Oles Honchar National University of Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine

Accuracy and Fluency in Teaching English

All the teachers are familiar with the fact that there are students whose language is virtually error free, but who are painful to interact with because the production of every word is such a struggle. Others are fast and fluent speakers but their language is practically unintelligible because of the errors they make. A happy balance would be learners who are able to fine-tune their output so as to make it intelligible, but who, at the same time, are equipped with a core of readily available, fairly automatic language, so that they can cope the pressures of real-time communication. The purpose of the practice activities is to target these two objectives: precision when applying the system, and automation of the system. We call these objectives, respectively, accuracy and fluency.

Accuracy is judged by the extent to which the learner’s output matches some external standard – traditionally the output of an idealized native speaker. This standard has been called into question in the light of both the spread of English as an international language, and the development of different ‘Englishes’, to the point where it may now be impossible to agree on an acceptable standard. Nevertheless, most teachers have fairly reliable intuition when it comes to assessing a learner’s command of the linguistic systems, such as grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation.

Fluency is an even more elusive concept. Its non-specialist meaning of ‘relatively effortless and fluid speech’ was side-lined by communicative theorists in the seventies, when they attempted to re-define fluency in terms of communicative competence. Fluency came to be equated with the language use, and fluency activities were those where the focus was on the message, not the form. However, the distinction seems to be a misleading one. It seems perfectly feasible to have message-focused speech events where there is, nevertheless, a strong incentive to be accurate (think of air traffic controllers); and it is also possible to have fairly meaningless speech events where the focus is on fluency (tongue twisters, for example).

Hence, the formula that ‘accuracy = form’, while ‘fluency = meaning’ has been called into question, and there is a case for reclaiming the traditional meaning of fluency. According to Skehan, for example: “Fluency concerns the learner’s capacity to produce language in real time without undue pausing or hesitation”. Research into the exact nature of fluency suggest that it is not so much a matter of the speed of delivery, but more to do with the length of the ‘run’ – the more words you can put together without pausing, the more fluent you are. Of course, fluency at the expense of accuracy may result in long but incoherent runs, so the ideal learner is the one who can balance the demands of real-time processing with the need to be reasonably accurate.

Now, when we clarified the terms, let’s dwell upon ways of practicing accuracy and fluency. So, what are the characteristics of accuracy activities? For learners to be able to devote attention to ‘getting it right’ i.e. to engage the rule-based system, they need time. Research suggests that learners become more accurate in proportion to the time they have available. They can use this time to plan, monitor and fine-tune their output. It may therefore be counterproductive to rush students through activities designed for the practice of accuracy, since they also need to devote attention to form. It will help if they are not attempting to express meanings which are complex or novel. For example, telling a story with which they are familiar will be easier to fine-tune for accuracy than if they create a new story from scratch.

Learners also need to value accuracy, that is, they need to see that without it, they risk being unintelligible. This means that they need unambiguous feedback when they make mistakes that threaten intelligibility. By correcting learners’ errors, teachers not only provide this feedback, but they convey the message that accuracy is important. Knowing they are being carefully monitored often helps learners monitor themselves.

And what makes for a good fluency activity? Fluency activities are aimed at the process of automation. Too much attention to form may jeopardize fluency, since it tempts learners to use analyzed language rather than memorized language. One way of diverting attention away from form is to design practice tasks where the focus is primarily on meaning, through the use, for example, of communicative activities, such as information-gap tasks. As pointed out earlier, communicative tasks are not fluency tasks by definition; they simply provide good conditions for the development of fluency, since attention to form is ‘distracted’ by the need to produce and process language in real time. Drills and jazz chants are also a form of fluency practice, since they encourage the rapid delivery of chunks, and their repetitive nature facilitates memorizing. A combination of a meaning-focused but drill-type activity would be something like ‘Find someone who…’, in which students mingle, repeatedly asking a formulaic question (such as ‘Have you ever been to…?’) in order to complete a class survey.

Of course, the ideal activity would be one in which both accuracy and fluency are involved. Such an activity would need to have an element of real-time processing, while at the same time providing the time and incentive for analysis. Internet chat is a medium which combines some of the real-time effects of speech but which, because it is written, allows a measure of monitoring for accuracy. Having students to take part in chants is an excellent way of balancing the demands for fluency (using memorized language) and the demands of accuracy (applying rules). But chat programs are not the only medium: the same effects can be created in the class with pen and paper. Students in pairs simply ‘talk’ to each other, but write their conversations rather than speak them.