The Impact of Consciousness Raising and Communicative Tasks on Fluency and Accuracy during Interaction within Saudi Secondary School Students

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of collaborative tasks on language performance, with a focus on fluency and accuracy. Three groups of Saudi learners of English in a secondary school were given either awareness raising tasks, meaning-based activities or a combination. Quantitative data collected from 72 Saudi learners of English and then analysed to answer the research questions. The test results were analysed for speech fluency, written fluency, accuracy and lexical richness to provide quantitative measures of any improvement over the three test periods. Consideration was also given to language related episodes (LREs), i.e. pauses, repetitions and self-correction to identify changes during the interactions. The results indicated that there was an improvement in both fluency and accuracy. In addition, there is a likely significant benefit of encouraging interaction amongst peers during a task-based learning approach, particularly when there is a combination of CT and CR tasks, when compared to one task type. The findings underline the relationship between classroom interaction and practice and improvements in fluency and accuracy. This is important due to the increasing view that in the teaching of EFL, fluency is being neglected despite its importance in achieving communicative competence as Tavakoli and Hunter (2018) noted. As a result of the findings we argue that Saudi secondary school EFL classes should place a greater emphasis on TBL and interaction, combining both consciousness raising and communicative tasks to maximise the improved benefits seen in this study.