Here we share an extract from Jack Richards’ Teacher Development title, Key Issues in Language Teaching. Jack suggests how we can help learners to develop their grammatical accuracy, fluency and complexity. He also provides a number of questions so you can reflect on your own teaching. You might also like to try out some of his suggestions in the classroom, such as ‘repeat performance’ and consider the impact it has on the learners’ grammatical usage.
Developing accuracy, fluency and complexity
There are several ways in which classroom activities can help learners develop the use of grammatically appropriate language, acquire more complex forms and also improve their fluency. These involve providing support at three different stages: prior to the activity, during the activity and after completing an activity.
Providing support prior to the activity
Here there are two goals: (1) to provide language support that can be used in completing a task, and (2) to clarify the nature of the task so that students can give less attention to procedural aspects of the task and hence monitor their language use during their performance, while carrying out a task. Skehan notes (1996a: 53): ‘Pre-task activities can aim to teach or mobilize or make salient language which will be relevant to task performance.’ This can be accomplished in several ways.
By pre-teaching certain linguistic forms
These forms can then be used while completing the task. For example, prior to completing a role-play task which practises calling an apartment owner to discuss renting an apartment, students can first read advertisements for apartments and learn key vocabulary they will use in a role play. They could also listen to and practise a dialogue in which a prospective tenant calls an apartment owner for information. The dialogue serves both to display different questioning strategies and to model the kind of task the students will perform.
By reducing the cognitive complexity of the activity
If an activity is difficult to carry out, learners’ attention may be diverted to the structure and management of the task, leaving little opportunity for them to monitor the language they use on the task. One way of reducing the cognitive complexity of the activity is to provide students with a chance for prior rehearsal. Dialogue work prior to carrying out the role play referred to above might serve the function of introducing students to the relevant structures.
By giving time to plan the activity
Time allocated to planning, prior to carrying out an activity, can likewise provide learners with schemas, vocabulary and language forms that they can call upon while completing the task. Brainstorming activities fall into this area.
What kind of support would be useful to provide to learners prior to their practising an interview task?
Providing support during an activity
A focus on language and skill in performance can be facilitated during the completion of an activity by choosing how the activity is to be carried out. The way it is implemented can determine whether it is carried out fluently, with a focus on target-language forms, or disfluently, with excessive dependence on communication strategies and with employment of lexicalized, rather than grammaticalized, discourse as well as the overuse of ellipsis and non-linguistic resources. Factors which can be varied in order to increase or decrease the level of fluency include:
- Participation: Whether the activity is completed individually or with other learners.
- Procedures: The number of procedures involved in completing an activity.
- Resources: The materials and other resources provided for the learners to use while completing an activity.
- Order: The sequencing of an activity in relation to previous tasks.
- Product: The outcome or outcomes students produce, such as a written product or an oral one.
For example, in conducting a survey task, the design of the resources students use could have a crucial impact on the appropriateness of the language used in carrying out the task. If the survey form or questionnaire students use provides models of the types of questions they should ask, it may result in a better level of language use during questioning and make other aspects of the task easier and hence more fluent, since less planning will need to be devoted to formulating appropriate questions.
Similarly, the order of an activity in relation to other tasks may influence the use of target structures. For example, if students are to carry out an activity that requires the use of sequence markers, a prior activity which models how sequence markers are used may result in more frequent use of sequence markers during the performance of the target task (see Swain, 1999).
What kind of support to help students during the ‘carrying-out phase’ would be useful in a group discussion task with intermediate-level students?
Providing support after the activity
Grammatical appropriateness can also be addressed after a task has been completed. There are several activities of this type:
- Public performance: After completing an activity in small groups, students carry out the same task in front of the class or another group. This can have the effect of prompting them to perform the activity using more accurate language, as well as more fluently, and can lead to stretched output as noted above.
- Repeat performance: The same activity might be repeated with some elements modified, such as the amount of time available. Nation (1989), for example, reports improvements in fluency, control of content and, to a lesser extent, accuracy when learners repeat an oral task under time constraints.
- Performance by others: The students might listen to more advanced learners (or even native speakers) completing the same task and focus on some of the linguistic and communicative resources employed in the process.
What kind of post-performance support could be provided for a role play?
If you are on the lookout for some more teaching resources, you’ll enjoy the free sample content in our series about Scott Thornbury’s title, About Language second edition!