Reflective Journal #6

"There's no point doing oral tasks if students use bad English to do it."

I have had the same thought. I felt that accuracy was the most important criteria for all oral tasks. This was me in the past.

Now, I still think accuracy is important; however, fluency and confidence are the other two things that are crucial when students are doing oral tasks. In the real world, it is not necessary for people to use grammatically correct sentences when they are communicating orally. In fact, a lot of native speakers speak with sentences that contain many grammatical mistakes. Therefore, accuracy should not be the first and only thing that a teacher should ask from students when conducting oral tasks. Teachers should help students overcome shyness when speaking in English. Also, teachers should focus on training students' fluency.

Of course, it is ideal that students can speak fluently and confidently without making any mistakes. But we have to remember that if students are focusing on the accuracy of their sentences, they will not be able to speak fluently and confidently. Therefore, to me, once students are comfortable with speaking English and are not afraid of making mistakes, I consider that the first step has been reached. The next step would be accuracy.