Fluency, accuracy, and complexity in language
- When we specify goals for students’ language production, we want them to use language correctly or accurately, and we also want them to develop fluency and increasing complexity in their language.
- Different language-learning tasks have characteristics that are more likely to promote one or other of these objectives.
- Language-learning tasks can be structured to promote particular aspects of language development.
Some aspects of language: Fluency, accuracy, and complexity
Communicative uses: Reading, writing, speaking, listening, oral interaction
Language analysis: Sounds, words, sentences, texts
Language production: Fluency, accuracy, complexity.
Teachers need to take account of various aspects of language development. This inquiry looks at the aspects of fluency , accuracy , and complexity in language production, and how to target these separately in teaching.
- Fluency: In productive language, this can be simply a measure of how many connected words a person can say or write in a given time. Fluency measures may also take into account the number of hesitations, self-corrections, repetitions, and space fillers like ‘um’. A person may speak quite slowly but be very fluent because none of these ‘interruptions’ occur.
Fluency is often associated with speed, but speed in itself has no value. What is important is the ability to work with the rhythm, pace, and accuracy that is appropriate to the purpose for reading or writing. Being measured and deliberate may be right for one purpose, and reading or writing quickly, or expressively, may be best for another. Whatever the purpose, fluency should not be thought of as separate from comprehension.
(Ministry of Education, 2006, page 24.)
- Accuracy: This relates to the number of mistakes a speaker (or writer) makes, and to whether they use the forms that are expected for the type of text being produced. For example, it would be inaccurate to use very formal language in a personal note to a friend, just as it is inaccurate to write *”he was falled down”1 .
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Complexity: This relates to aspects such as the number of different words a person uses (which reflects the size of their vocabulary), the variety and complexity of grammatical structures they use, and the complexity of their sentences (see the inquiry What makes sentences hard for learners? ) and their texts (see the inquiry Finding information in complex texts ).
You can read more about some measures of these aspects of language in Ellis, 2003, page 117.
Footnote
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When an asterisk is written before a linguistic form, as in *”he was falled down”, the asterisk shows that the form is incorrect.
