Accuracy or fluency

With respect to accuracy or fluency issues, this section is about whether meaning, forms, or form are focused upon when students do their oral presentation in the English classroom. The findings data reveal that the Chinese EFL student group in the Chinese EFL context as a whole was more concerned with formal accuracy than functional fluency, making conscious efforts to avoid errors in using the target language. From the questionnaire data with respect to the question of language teaching focusing more on fluency than accuracy, students had a much stronger negative reaction. Eighty-three of the 104 students (79.8%) objected to a focus on fluency, 16 (15%) were uncertain, and only 5 of the 104 students (4.8%) agreed with this statement. The reaction of all the Chinese EFL teacher participants on this issue was consistent with their students.

157 However, the qualitative data from interviews show that the Chinese EFL teacher participant focused on students’ fluency as well as accuracy when her students answered her questions or did oral presentations.

[I focus on] both. They don’t have to speak very fast, but their grammar has got to be reasonably accurate and the intonation must be adequately good.

[CNT, SRI1, p.1]

This requirement from the teacher was fully accepted by most of her students, the EFL Chinese students from the Chinese EFL context. During the SRI, nearly all of her students knew well that their teacher expected both accuracy and fluency from them when answering questions or doing an oral presentation:

We would like to speak more fluently as well as making no mistakes. There is no use to speak fluently with lots of mistakes.

[CNS1, SRI1, p.1]

However, one Chinese student had a different point of view on this issue and would expect her teacher to stress accuracy rather than fluency.

I think accuracy should be emphasized. There is no use to speak fluently with lots of mistakes. I think accuracy should be the first, then fluency.

[CNS6, SRI2, p.6]

Another Chinese student expressed that whether accuracy or fluency or both should be required largely depended on students’ language levels.

It depends on an individual student. If a student’s level is high, accuracy and fluency would be required. If a student’s language level is low, accuracy would be focused [upon], so it really depends……

[CNS7, SRI2, p.6]

158 Therefore, it appears from the data in this study that both students and their teachers in the Chinese EFL context believed that meaning (meaningful communication) should be emphasised during the students’ oral presentation while forms (error correction) should be focused on as soon as the students finished their speech. The Chinese EFL teacher participant and most of her students expected that learning outcomes should focus not only on fluency but also on accuracy. However, this study shows that there are no comments from the New Zealand ESL teacher and Chinese ESL student participants on this topic.

In short, from the analysis above, it is interesting to note here that even though all the EFL student participants in the Chinese EFL context would like their EFL teacher to correct nearly all their mistakes in their oral speech, they still preferred to have fluent communication in English which should not be interrupted by error correction conducted by their EFL teacher. In this way, communication made by students would carry on smoothly and fluently, and errors made by students would be corrected at the end of discourse. However, in order to achieve this, the teacher is required to remember all errors made by students during their speech, otherwise the teacher can only correct some or most of them. Not only FormS but also Focus-on-Meaning has been emphasized during the English conversation in the Chinese EFL classroom, which might therefore be described as Focus-on-Form instruction (see Section 2.3.2). The findings shown above reveal that Focus-on-Form instruction, to some extent, has been achieved at some stages of English language teaching and learning in the Chinese EFL context. Comments on the importance, the manner, the timing of error correction and accuracy or fluency from the Chinese EFL teacher and her EFL students are closely aligned in the Chinese EFL context.

5.7 Classroom tasks

This section addresses Research Question 1f, what were classroom tasks used in the classroom of the Chinese EFL context and how were they perceived by EFL and ESL teachers and their Chinese EFL and ESL student participants in these two contexts. It discusses some general tendencies manifest in classroom tasks in the Intensive Reading

159 Course (IRC) of the Chinese EFL context and how the teaching objectives are articulated by means of appropriate and effective tasks in the Chinese EFL classroom.

The data from the fieldwork indicate that the classroom tasks conducted in the Chinese EFL context are forms-focused. For example, the common tasks generally conducted in the Chinese EFL classroom are text-reading, text-retelling, text-reciting, note-taking, oral presentation, dialogue, exercises, dictation, pattern drills and so on. In the following description of the results, only note-taking and text-reading will be highlighted, as these are regarded as typically representative of language classroom activities in the Chinese EFL context. Take a task of text-reciting as an example. In the Chinese EFL classrooms, students are expected to remember every word and every sentence of a text mechanically. Both quantitative and qualitative data on this type of task (three examples shown below) from the SRI and interviews are presented here.