4.1 The teacher’s cognition and classroom practices in terms of
4.1.4 Discussion of the teacher’s cognition and classroom
The teacher in this study agreed that both accuracy and fluency were important in English speaking instruction. She wanted to focus on fluency to help her students “achieve their communicative goals” and on accuracy because it was
“the basis for them to develop their ideas” (I). This view echoed Shen’s (2013, p.
819) description of the relationship between accuracy and fluency in speaking instruction: “Accuracy is the basis of fluency while fluency is a further improvement of a person’s linguistic competence and a better revelation of his/her communicative competence”. The teachers in the study of Yue’e and Yunzhang (2011) also believed that both accuracy (vocabulary and pattern drills) and fluency (authentic context for language use) were important in English speaking instruction.
However, their counterparts in the study of Cohen and Fass (2001) preferred accuracy to fluency by ranking grammar the most important element of good English speaking. There has been much debate on the “goals of learning speaking”:
inaccurate but comprehensible speech or perfectly accurate oral production (Kumar, 2013, p. 17). A number of studies on the learning and teaching of speaking asserted that both accuracy and fluency were important to successful oral production (Richards & Renandy, 2002; Brown, 2003; Kumar, 2013; Shen, 2013). The participant in this study also shared this common view on the importance of both accuracy and fluency in speaking instruction. A noteworthy point was that although she wanted to focus on both, her cognition revealed that fluency was her primary concentration. Even in choosing accuracy-focused activities, she liked question-
and-answer best because “it is more communicative” (I) and substitution because it helped her students “express more ideas” (I). This fluency orientation was consistent with that of the teachers in the study of Zan (2013).
Because of her belief that both accuracy and fluency were important in the teaching of speaking, she used both accuracy- and fluency-focused activities in her classroom practices. Another reason for this was her students’ levels. In the stimulated recall interview, she clearly stated that the speaking activities in her class were “bridges” (SR) between accuracy and fluency because the students’ levels were still low. Therefore, although she “tried to let them talk freely” (SR), there was still some accuracy orientation.
Similar to the teachers in the study of Cohen and Fass (2001), the participant frequently used question-and-answer activities to help her students develop their oral fluency, which was not in line with her cognition that role plays, interviews, and information gap should be used most often. The reason for this was that she wanted to focus on both accuracy and fluency because of her students’ levels. This led to the use of question-and-answer which struck a balance between the two foci.
In question-and-answer activities, she could help her students develop their fluency by asking them follow-up questions as well as focus on accuracy by correcting some of their common mistakes. Besides students’ levels, there were two more contextual factors leading to the use of question-and-answer activities in her class.
First, three of these activities were part of the textbook. The World Link textbook series aims to develop learners’ oral fluency; therefore, after each language skill (listening, reading, and writing) or language area (vocabulary and grammar), there are usually some boxes of questions for students to ask and answer in pairs or in groups. This indicates an integrated skills orientation of the textbook and provides learners with “a welcome relief from more formal work (Harmer, 1998, p. 95)”. The teacher used all of these boxes. Second, in the stimulated recall interview, she believed that two of these question-and-answer activities (students’ talks about their favorite performers/acts and about a painting in the textbook) would help “bring
personal experiences into the classroom” (SR). Therefore, students’ experiences were the second factor leading to the frequent use of question-and-answer activities.
In summary, the teacher used question-and-answer activities most frequently in her class because of her wish to focus on both accuracy and fluency and three contextual factors (students’ levels, students’ experiences, and the textbook). This tension between her cognition and classroom practices also showed that she possessed two types of cognition as classified by Borg (2006): ideal-oriented cognition and reality-oriented cognition. Ideally, she would use the more fluency- focused activities in the checklist to help her students achieve their communicative goals and prepare them for real-life communication. However, because of three contextual factors (students’ levels, students’ experiences, and the textbook), she often used question-and-answer activities, which were less fluency-focused, to help her students develop both accuracy and fluency. This finding was consistent with those of the studies of Phipps and Borg (2009) and Gerami and Noordin (2013) in that classroom practices were aligned with teacher cognition shaped by contextual factors, which was called “core beliefs” in the former, “modified beliefs” in the latter, and “reality-oriented cognition” in this study.
In summary, this section showed that the teacher focused on both accuracy and fluency in English speaking instruction because of her belief in their importance and her students’ levels. It also revealed that her classroom practice in terms of fluency-focused activities (i.e. using question-and-answer activities frequently) was consistent with her reality-oriented cognition that she should help students develop both accuracy and fluency. This reality-oriented cognition was shaped by three contextual factors including students’ levels, students’ experiences, and the textbook. In the following section, the participant’s cognition and classroom practices related to the second theme of the study, i.e. speaking elements, will be presented.