Lesson Plan TEFL

Accuracy and Fluency ActivitiesNowadays, how to communicate successfully in the English language has become more significant than reading and writing. For most people, the importance of producing messages effectively and to negotiate meaning is essential. People communicate for various reasons. They want to listen to something, they are interested in what is being said, they want to say something and/ or they have some communicative purposes. It is the teacher?s role to create the need and interest, in the students, to be part of a communicative activity. A classroom activity may aim at accuracy or fluency. Some teachers argue that as long as the learner can make him/herself understood no matter how incorrect the language is, the speech is considered successful. Other teachers argue that emphasis on correctness in every aspect of the language ranging from grammatical structures to pronunciation is the right way to go. The fluency-oriented approach focuses mainly on developing the students? spontaneous communicative skills. The emphasis is on how well ideas are expressed or understood. At this point in time, small grammatical or pronunciation errors are insignificant. students are allowed to experiment and be creative with the language. That creative freedom is key to develop spoken skills and to acquire the language in a natural way. Most good fluency activities are the ones just as in real life. Here are some examples: Information gap: The content of the language is created by the students but the scenario comes from the teacher. The teacher hands out different pieces of information to each student about a mystery. students need to find a way to get information from other students in order to solve the mystery. Talking about oneself: students share social and cultural information. Also, jobs, school, personal stories etc? Debates : The teacher divides the class into two groups. One group of students will have to debate in favor of hunting whereas the other group of students will have to argue against hunting. The accuracy oriented approach, on the other hand, focuses on helping students to achieve accurate awareness and produce a sound, a word, a whole sentence. students? errors are corrected and carefully looked at, tasks are controlled and don?t usually simulate real life situations. Teachers make the students aware of their repeated mistakes. Here are some examples of accuracy activities: Drilling - Controlled activity: A good drilling activity would be to engage students to repeat several times the vocabulary and the grammatical structures that are used in the lesson. To ensure correctness, the teacher randomly selects students and asks them to pronounce sounds they are not familiar with. Prompting ? Controlled activity: The teacher distributes a piece of paper with several questions on it. students are asked to give an answer to each question. Every answer given with an incorrect pronunciation will be reproduced with the right pronunciation from the teacher. students will be asked to repeat what the teacher says and to notice the difference between the incorrect pronunciation and the correct one. In conclusion, one needs to bear in mind that fluency and accuracy activities are not free of weaknesses. From a fluency stand point, uncorrected errors can become a normal way of speaking from the learner?s perspective and can prevent the learner from getting better. From an accuracy standpoint, repeated error correction can quickly discourage learners from speaking and lead them to becoming bored. To some degree, accuracy and fluency are related. Teachers should find a way to balance fluency and accuracy activities for successful communication.