Skip to main content

Accuracy versus fluency

One of the best things to happen in language teaching over recent decades is the movement away from accuracy at all costs to a greater emphasis on listening skill and fluency. In the heyday of the grammar-translation era, accuracy was paramount and class activities focused on the precise translation to and from the mother tongue, along with detailed comprehension of written texts.

With the communicative movement of the 1970s onward the focus rightly shifted towards the use of language for practical communication. Mistakes were tolerated as long as they did not interfere with getting the message across. We soon got used to the notion of the "sympathetic native speaker" when assessing what a student had said or written.

But of course we would like accuracy too and as teachers we should aim for it without hindering communication.

With this in mind, I rather like the idea of planning lessons with the main focus on EITHER accuracy OR fluency. You can even share this with classes: "Today I don't want you to worry about being absolutely correct, just have a go!" "This is a fluency activity, folks, make as many mistakes as you want!"

Fluency activities might information gaps, dialogues, guessing games, "who is the first who can't something", general oral discussion. In these cases the teacher would be a listener, rather than a correcter. The teacher may even back off completely, take a well earned rest and let students get on with just the occasional reminder if they go off task.

In contrast accuracy activities would include question-answer to practise a grammar point previously presented, structured drills, written grammar exercises, repetition, pair work tasks with a focus on grammar, such as battleships or paired dictation. In these cases the teacher would correct where necessary.

I do not wish to set up a false dichotomy here, but it is worth mentioning that there is a theoretical basis for making the accuracy/fluency distinction, if you accept the natural acquisition hypotheses and the notion that the focus on accuracy merely helps students develop their ability to monitor their own accuracy and to self-correct. Worrying about getting things wrong sets up an affective barrier for students and inhibits their language acquisition. Comprehension and fluency tasks remain the heart of language acquisition.

My hunch would be that many teacher linguists still tend to focus on accuracy too much. Why? Firstly because they are good at it themselves and sometimes come from an era when it was highly valued. Secondly, in school getting things right or wrong is still a basic fact of life and thirdly assessments, for all sorts of reasons, still place an undue emphasis on written skills where, despite mark schemes which reward successful communication, accuracy still counts.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,