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Productive and Receptive Skills in the ESL Classroom - Accuracy vs. Fluency

 

Before we move on to the planning of a lesson for speaking skills, something that we need to look at first is the idea of the accuracy versus the fluency of speaking. Accuracy relates to the correct usage of grammar and vocabulary, whereas fluency relates to our ability to continue speaking without any interruption. Now, ultimately within a whole ESA lesson or within language learning itself fluency and accuracy are equally important. Within an ESA lesson, however, depending upon which stage we're at in that lesson, then we're either focusing on accuracy or we're focusing on fluency. Remember in the ESA lesson, in the study phase, this is where we're looking at the target language where we're doing our language learning, so it's very important in this stage that we focus on the accuracy of the language, whereas in the activate stage we're trying to get the students to use the language in the realistic way and what we want them to do there is to focus on fluency.


Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.

I refreshed the knowledge of the conditionals and indirect speech. I find the chart with the tenses for the reported speech very useful. Also I found the activities for practicing the conditionals and reported speech interesting and plan to use them as created materials on the lessons.This unit was about how to teach vocabulary and structure. It explained what to use and what not to use in the Engage phase, study phase and Activate phase. Is said what students need to know about vocabulary and what is not important. We repeated the different possible ESA structures.This unit was very useful to refresh my memory about the rules (with their relative exceptions) of English grammar. I think it covers pretty much everything about the basics. In particular, I appreciated the tip concerning how to order different classes of adjectives inside a sentence.



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