A comparison between the impact of the tasks rhetorical argumentation and narrating stories on fluency and accuracy

Abstract

"The present study is a comparison between the impact of rhetorical argumentation and narrating stories on students’ fluency and accuracy in communicative competence. We aimed at evaluating the usefulness and suitability of these tasks, and their efficiency when it comes to teaching fluency and accuracy by analysing the direct effects of the tasks on the indices of fluency and accuracy. The problematic issue in this research investigates the effects of the task rhetorical argumentation, and whether it is an important task that teachers should rely on it in teaching speaking in academic contexts. The research hypotheses are used to probe the aims and they are: 1) - If students are taught how to organize information rhetorically, then they will master fluency and accuracy. 2) - If rhetorical argumentation is used as a communicative task in the classroom, then the students’ level of fluency and accuracy will improve. 3) - Teachers should be made aware that rhetorical argumentation is more suitable than narrating stories for teaching fluency and accuracy in academic contexts. In this research, we worked with second year students at the University of Frères Mentouri, Constantine. The sample is composed of 65 students which are divided in between 30 students in the control group and 35 students in experimental group. The data was collected by two research methods: a classroom observation and an experiment. The former is used to evaluate three main areas which are: classroom interaction, topic knowledge and language knowledge. The latter is developed with a pre-test and a post-test to validate or invalidate the research hypotheses by calculating the coefficient correlation (r), t-test and the standard deviation. The results of the experiment show that there are two types of fluency which are procedural and automatic, rhetorical argumentation can be used to develop procedural fluency, and not automatic since the task is considered as difficult and students were not familiar with it. While the task of narrating stories strengthens students automatic fluency since the task was familiar to they and they already possess schema knowledge."