Whenever we see English questions, whether in public examinations, BCS, or any recruitment test, let alone the internal examinations of educational institutions, we can see that the questions are heavily based on complex grammar rules. We do not focus on fluency.
It seems that all want to see whether students or candidates are familiar with various types of exceptional rules of English grammar, or full explanations or clarifications of English grammar, not with fluency in English.
They seem less bothered about testing students’ or candidates’ communicative competence. Moreover, they want to see whether the students and candidates have memorised particular rules, as well as many exceptional ones.
They seem more interested in learning whether students and candidates learn more complex, usually unused rules, and whether the criteria determine students’ or candidates’ depth of learning English.
And so, students and job seekers want to develop their grammatical competence, but not their real linguistic competence. It seems that all the students or candidates have been conducting language research.
Finally, the questions prove that the authorities either present conflicting ideas about teaching English as a compulsory subject in our country, as they test students’ depth of learning in grammar, or emphasise memorising grammatical rules. That basically convinces us that the objective of teaching English to our students is unclear.
The debate over whether grammar or fluency should take precedence in second language acquisition is long-standing. While grammatical accuracy is crucial for clarity and precision in communication, fluency, the ability to communicate ideas smoothly and naturally, arguably plays a more significant role in real-world language use.
Oral fluency enhances motivation, aligns with students’ wants, lacks, and necessities, and fosters greater long-term retention. However, grammar can play an important role in supporting and expanding fluency development.
DeKeyser (2005) argues that teaching grammar to such students constitutes a form of social injustice, as traditional grammar-focused methods disadvantage those without strong foundational literacy skills. Given this, a fluency-first approach may be a more equitable and effective strategy for ensuring all students can achieve communicative competence.
Here is a question from an admission test for cadet colleges that asks students in class six to identify the parts of speech of the underlined words in the following letter.
Dear students, silence please. Look at me. Try to guess what I want to tell you by my body language. Please keep silent. Now go straight and left. Cross two blocks. Turn right. Find the red building. Speak to the security people there. Tell them that you are from Modhupur High School. Show them this paper if they ask you to prove your identity. Do not enter inside until they ask you to, and do not lose this paper, please.
Students will have to identify how and why the underlined words have assumed different names for parts of speech, which definitely calls for their deep attention and has no link with testing students’ linguistic ability, other than assessing their depth of knowledge of grammar. Do we teach English to our students for that purpose?
If we look at the public examination questions, most of the items there aim to test students’ grammatical depth, avoiding the idea that students need to develop their language skills to face the practicalities of life.
Fluency is central to communicative competence, which defines effective language use as the ability to convey meaning efficiently and appropriately in real-life contexts. Fluency encompasses speed, automaticity, and ease of expression, all of which facilitate meaningful interactions.
Research suggests that focusing too heavily on grammatical correctness can hinder fluency by causing learners to hesitate and overanalyse their speech, disrupting the natural flow of conversation. Studies on Second Language Communication Strategies have shown that learners who prioritise fluency are more likely to develop functional communication skills.
It is imperative to focus on what will best prepare learners for real-world communication rather than perfecting grammatical accuracy at the cost of communicative competence.
Students who develop strong speaking and listening skills can achieve high grades even if their grammatical accuracy is not perfect. This further underscores the importance of prioritising fluency over rigid grammatical structures. One of the major challenges in language learning is maintaining student motivation.
Research by Horwitz and Cope (1986) on Foreign Language Anxiety found that learners who feel pressured to produce grammatically perfect speech often develop communication apprehension, leading to reluctance in speaking. Studies indicate that excessive emphasis on grammar instruction without fluency practice leads to a lack of automaticity, making spontaneous communication difficult.
Learners must engage in meaningful, communicative output to internalise grammatical structures naturally. This is evident in immersion-based learning, where learners who prioritise conversation and interaction achieve higher fluency and more natural grammatical acquisition over time than those who focus on rule memorisation.
Real conversations are fast, and it is nearly impossible to think that fast, especially when talking to a native speaker. When a non-native speaker thinks about translations and grammar during a real conversation, he/she will quickly become lost. Instead of listening carefully to the other person, he will be translating his own responses and trying to remember grammar, making him hesitant to speak.
After years of studying English in school, most people believe that grammar study is the key to English-speaking. In fact, many learners cannot imagine learning English without studying grammar rules. Students must learn grammar rules in all kinds of educational institutions.
The problem with studying grammar is that instead of speaking English, learners focus on analysing it. They become like the soccer player who studies physics to improve. A learner can learn a lot of information, but their skill never seems to improve much. In other words, he thinks about English instead of doing it. He thinks about the past tense, the present tense, the future tense, the present perfect, and the past perfect.
Now, for writing English, that is not as bad. When he writes English, he has time to think things through slowly and take his own time erasing his mistakes. It is less of a problem. He may not need to write fast. Nevertheless, when it comes to speaking, there is no time. He does not have time to think about the rules for the present perfect tense in English when he is talking to people.
If someone asks you a question, you have to answer it immediately. You do not have time to think about prepositions. You do not have time to think about verb tenses, possessives, phrasal verbs – all the other linguistic terms you have learned.
Grammar should be learnt intuitively without thinking of tenses, conjugations and other items. Point-of-view stories are easy and fun and can be used to teach or learn English Grammar. These stories refer to the perspective from which the narrative is told, influencing how readers perceive the events, characters, and themes. Point of view is crucial in storytelling as it shapes the reader’s experience and understanding of the narrative.
They allow readers to absorb the grammar naturally by understanding the context of stories. That is the key point. Rather than studying abstract grammar rules, learners acquire spoken grammar skills through meaningful, memorable English.
How do point-of-view stories work? In the simplest version, you start by listening to a main story – usually told from the past point of view. In other words, the story is mostly about events from the past. Next, you listen to another version of the story, with a different point of view. So, for example, you might hear the same story told again in the present.
Then you listen to yet another version, told as if it will happen in the future. Alternatively, another version discusses past events that have carried over into the present. Each point-of-view story is basically the same, but the change in time alters the language use, especially the verbs.
By repeatedly listening to these stories, a learner easily and naturally absorbs the most common and useful English grammar tenses, learning them subconsciously and intuitively; he will actually use them correctly when he speaks without thinking about them.
If we do not try to learn English grammar contextually and more communicatively, our communicative competence will not truly develop. For testing students’ communicative skills, assessments should be very contextual and use point-of-view stories. Only then will the way English is taught change to serve its real purpose.
About the Author
Masum Billah works as a President of the English Teachers' Association of Bangladesh (ETAB), Dhaka, Bangladesh. He previously worked as an Education Specialist at BRAC, an international NGO in Bangladesh.
