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Promoting
fluency and accuracy through planning, telling, transcribing
and noticing by Scott Shelton
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Introduction
My
interest in providing meaningful opportunities for learners
in the classroom to increase both their fluency and accuracy
began when I first started teaching many years ago. Early
this year, I was introduced to the ideas put forth in this
paper and the subsequent experimental lesson, which it is
based on, at a teacher development seminar. Since then I have
wanted to try these ideas out in my classes to observe how
they work in action. I decided to make a fusion of the two
central ideas I was introduced to and experiment with them
in the classroom. In this paper, I will attempt to give the
necessary background information in both the theory behind
these ideas and how they can be put into practice.
Anecdotal
activities
I
have found, in my teaching experience, that in order to promote
fluency students react better to and are more motivated by
communicative activities and situations that they can relate
to personally and which have an element of choice that they
can exercise. Sue Kay (2001) brings out the point in a recent
article and states:
Anecdotal
activities create the necessary conditions for personal engagement
by encouraging students to talk about things that really matter
to them, rather than playing pre-assigned roles or exchanging
invented information.
Anecdotal
activities are extended speaking activities that allow students
to engage in longer stretches of discourse than they are often
required to do in the course of a typical classroom exchange
between peers or initiated by the teacher as a response to
a question or as part of a dialogue. These extended stretches
of discourse in which the learner is required to be both fluent
and coherent, help develop speaking skills and provide the
opportunity to relate language and meaning, as the activity
is purposefully learner centered and personally relevant to
each student. It is also a type of discourse that is quite
typical in real life outside the classroom as well and therefore
important practice for the student and a practical way to
spend classroom time.
Setting
them up
The
activities can be set up by either providing a theme and a
set of guiding questions to aid in jogging memory, or by having
the students choose a theme and writing the questions themselves.
It is suggested that ten to twelve questions are an appropriate
number.
An
important element to bear in mind in these activities is to
allow the students time to plan before they begin speaking.
The planning should not consist of writing out exactly what
the student wants to say, but making notes on both what they
are going to say and how they are going to say it. If you
have a class with a majority of students with a preference
for auditory learning or wanted to work from this angle with
a group that might profit from exercising this sense, the
questions could be read aloud slowly or recorded and played
while the students listen with eyes closed after being instructed
to relax and visualize the answers to the questions. They
would later have time to prepare before asked to engage in
telling their anecdote.
The
anecdote may be preceded by or followed up with a recording
or a teacher telling a similar experience. In the first instance,
it would be a valuable model which could serve both in the
language likely to be used in their own telling and in activating
their mental script or general framework for this kind of
discourse which would help them be both better tellers and
listeners. Another idea for follow up work could be asking
them to transcribe all or part of their own or a classmate's
story and subsequently work on noticing the type of language
used and improving upon it if necessary.
Sue
Kay (2001) advocates asking students to repeat the task a
second time, insisting that in doing so, learners will become
more adventurous and more precise in the language they use.
She explains that:
The
first time the students do an anecdotal activity they are
more likely to concentrate on content whereas the second time,
they have more time to process the language, increase the
range of vocabulary and use more syntactically complex language.
In
my interest to aid my students develop fluency and increase
their level of accuracy and control of language, this kind
of activity, used consistently in classroom practice should
be of great practical use.
Promoting
Complexity
Patrick
Howarth (2001) takes a similar approach to combating the lack
of appropriate complexity which often mars the speech of post-intermediate
learners of English who, precisely because of their success
at being 'communicatively competent', never seem to develop
the more sophisticated language which would more appropriately
reflect the time they have spent leaning it. This is often
due to a lack of a perceived need on the part of the student
to improve upon form. Why bother when what is desired, to
be understood and to communicate one's message, is already
easily achieved? Helen Johnson (1992) describes this as the
fluent-but-fossilized student.
Howarth
(2001) suggests that if we expect our students' grammatical
and lexical systems to move on, teachers need to provide them
with practice specifically aimed at giving opportunities to
experiment. He puts forth an approach that is aimed at promoting
complexity and suggests that this approach is more appropriate
if our aim is not promoting accuracy and fluency, but complexity.
I
think this is an interesting distinction, but not an entirely
relevant one for the purposes of this paper. In wanting to
promote both fluency and accuracy
through
noticing, I believe that in effect, this is also promoting
complexity in the long term. His model is called the performance
process and is described such:
plan >> perform >> analyze >> repeat
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