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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 appreciate that the ESA concept keeps coming back in most units since I have yet to fully grasp it. I did not realize that the straight arrow ESA lesson could have parts for each part E-S-A so that was something good to note. I always thought that reading and listening were equally important and I was right but what is even more important is vocabulary!Designing syllabus is an extremely important part of the trainers` job, so I feel that this unit provided excellent structure of theories on designing the language syllabus, as well as very useful examples. It was also very useful to understand differences between different types of tests, and most importantly, understand when each of them should be used.



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