How to achieve a balance between fluency and accuracy in your own lesson

How to achieve a balance between fluency and accuracy in your own lessons

When planning a speaking lesson we should think about how much time will be devoted to fluency and accuracy. To find the right balance between the two it is essential to look at speaking practice through the communicative approach.

Let us start with exploring what fluency is and how it can be developed in the class. In the communicative language teaching fluency is natural language use occuring when a speaker engages in meaningful interaction and maintains comprehensible and ongoing communication despite some limitations in the communicative competence. Fluency is developed through classroom actitivies when a teacher creates the environment where students have to negotiate meaning and use communiction strategies to avoid communication breakdown. So, it is clear that meaningful communication should be the goal of every lesson.

This goal can be achieved when the main focus of a lesson is on fluency with grammar and vocabulary just being building blocks for successful communication. To become more fluent in English our students need more tasks to communicate their ideas and the more they speak, the more mistakes they will make. It happens because speaking involves spontaneous anwers and questions and this is where a lot of errors may occur. But we never expect students to be 100 % accurate, they are allowed to make mistakes and it is not going to be a problem as we can use their frequent mistakes to improve their language and make their speech more accurate.

In my own lessons I apply the same strategy as it seems to be the most effective one. During the lesson students speak exchanging information, sharing their views on something, discussing and solving problems and I take notes to be addressed later when the conversation is over. I never interfere as it can demotivate students to speak. I always allow mistakes to go unaddressed as long as they do not interfere with communication. Then, based on the notes I give students tasks to work on their vocabulary and grammar to correct the errors. Also, when planning the next lesson I take into account the areas where students have more problems with the language and prepare activities to help them improve their speaking skills. Therefore, the balance betwen fluency and accuracy in the lesson strongly depends on students' mistakes and difficulties in communication. However, the time devoted to accuracy should never exceed the time devoted to fluency, otherwise students might lose interest to speaking which is often quite hard to repair.

In this way students become aware of the fact that they should not be afraid to speak (as no one would criticise or correct them during speaking), they learn that all difficult areas and mistakes will be addressed later in a more comfortable atmosphere when they are ready to do it. So they build their skills step by step and very soon they become more confident and fluent in speaking English.

Thus, it is obvious that teachers should give students more tasks with the focus on meaning while language practise tasks will serve only as stepping stones to enable students speak more accurate.