Building Fluency

The aim of this course is to make teaching English more effective for the students and more efficient for the teacher.
Our goal as teachers is to help students develop both accuracy and fluency at all the skills they need to succeed.
We are going to learn and practice a simple and flexible approach to lesson planning that is easily adaptable to any textbook or methodology used in ELT.

This very practical 16 academic hour course, is divided into several problematics and solutions to make the best of our time with students, to build their reflexes, and turn their accuracy into fluency.

The course is separated into problematics and solutions as such:

Problematic 1: Why do students often develop fluency or accuracy but not both?
- Solutions:
  - Overview of student abilities, motivation and factors teachers can influence
Problematic 2: How to lead students to accurate knowledge?
- Reference: “System 1 and System 2 Thought Processes” theory
- Solutions:
  - Clear, reliable explanations relying on communicational necessity
  - A systematic approach to practice activities
Problematic 3: How to help students develop fluent skills?
- Reference: “Deliberate Practice” theory
- Solutions:
  - Automate activities to transfer knowledge to skills
  - Error correction techniques
  - A consistent build in difficulty to build strong reflexes
Problematic 4: How to assess fluency of a skill and plan future lessons efficiently?
- Solutions:
  - Speaking activities designed to test fluency
  - An assessment based on spontaneous use of skills
  - A lesson planning system based on the systematic approach to building up practice

By the end of the course, we will have developed a clear and flexible approach to build students to fluency in lessons and courses, and we will have explored an extensive number of materials and activities to reach our goals and the goals of our students.