Sqc And Fluency

SQC and Fluency Abdul Wahid Mir, Director General, WCTQEE, Pakistan. [email protected] Students Quality Circles give students an opportunity to discover their latent potentialities and use them in a highly effective way. It is heartening to know that during different stages of SQCs meetings and activities, students develop diversified skills and abilities; Fluent Oral Expression is one of them. In SQCs, students work to accomplish excellence in studies and different aspects of their life. To attain excellence, they bring quality in their lives and environment by minimizing interfering processes and procedures. The interfering factors are considered as ‘problems’ and students prioritize them and analyze them in a scientific way, apply statistical tools and find out several solutions. After going through a very efficient process, the best solution is applied to solve the most noteworthy problem. During this process all procedures are documented to standardize and generalize the solutions, to be used in similar cases elsewhere. The main aim of Students Quality Circle is to develop in students:1. A positive outlook 2. Problem solving techniques 3. Interpersonal skills 4. An objective approach to solve any kind of problem During the process of bringing excellence in the end- product, side-by-side a number of different skills also develop in students as by- products. The additional skills developed during the process are:1. Improvement in oral and written expression 2. Fluency in a target language 3. Understanding about other cultures 4. Understanding about the global peace. SQC and Oral Fluency SQCs’ role to improve fluency in students in a target language is very fascinating. It is observed that along with other required skills, a dramatic positive change comes in the

oral expression of students. When the contributory factors were observed and analyzed, some very interesting aspects of the phenomena came up. Linguistics and SQC: It is pertinent to look into the approach of linguists about attaining fluency. In the field of English Language Teaching or Linguistics, it is known that on the basis of their background knowledge the fluent speakers of any language are able to perform certain linguistic tasks. Those tasks are: •

Opportunity to produce speech

•

Conceptualizing and formulating ideas

•

Fixing incorrect expression

•

Articulation

•

Self analyses

•

Conditioned response

The same way fluent speakers also know: •

Socio-cultural aspects

•

Genre

•

Pragmatics of target language

•

Grammar

•

Vocabulary

The students in SQCs carry out certain standard processes during the problem solving activities that not only help them to bring a harmony in their thinking process but make them fluent in oral and written expression as well. During the meetings of SQCs, students use different problem solving tools, adopt some scientific procedures at different levels, and have detailed deliberations in the circle. After this they present their findings at different levels to different audience. Thus they go through almost all the processes and procedures that are necessary to attain fluency in the target language.

How Practices of SQCs help participants to attain fluency. Students must do or know to

Practices of participants in SQCs

attain FLUENCY 1. Opportunities to produce speech

1. In SQCs students do brainstorming. At the initial stages, they just supply words, clauses or phrases. 2. Then the brainstorming is stopped for a while and students are persuaded to incubate ideas 3. In the session after incubation period, students accept or reject the ideas presented and words are unwrapped. They explain those words or phrases and give arguments to substantiate their ideas. These are the opportunities when they make speeches.

2.Conceptulizing and formulating

1. All concepts are discussed in detail during

ideas

brainstorming so they clear the concept of students. 2. Simultaneously they formulate new ideas, as they are encouraged to be creative by lateral thinking.

3. Fixing incorrect expressions

1.

In weekly meetings students express their ideas freely and thus improve on their faulty structures by self-correction or by facilitator/peer feedback. 2.

Students have to present the case- study to

different audience, so they practice a lot and thus fix the problems of structure or grammar. They repeat same steps many times at different levels. 4. Articulation

Clarity of mind helps articulation. All organs of speech work accordingly when ideas are in

sequence at the threshold of mind. 5. Self Analyses

When a student explains the procedure adopted during different stages of sessions he/she speaks according to an act that has taken place in the recent past in reality. Thus all the processes are recalled in the mind of the student and he analyses his actions as well as his expression that is being used to explain the activity.

6. Conditioned response

1. A degree of conceptualization, formulation, articulation and self-analyses is required to achieve the fluency. Repeated different responses bring about a kind of automaticity. 2. During the process of presentations at different levels, students use pre-fabricated chunks of sentences and phrases, and this is the most important requirement to attain fluency.

7. Socio-cultural aspect

Students always take into account the sociocultural aspect of a problem. In a target language only such expressions are used in ‘Case Presentations’, which are socially and culturally acceptable.

8. Genre

During meetings, students either speak to convey a message or for the purpose of socializing. So appropriate genre are always used to do so.

9. Pragmatics of the language

Pragmatics describes the relationship between the language and the context. 1. When students choose appropriate problemsolving-tools and use them, they have to justify each and every decision. Thus they develop a relationship between the language

and the context. 10. Grammar

To analyze a problem and describe the methods to handle it, students need to use correct grammar otherwise the idea is neither conveyed nor accepted by other members of the circle. This, automatically, develops the habit of learning appropriate grammar to describe a process or situation.

11. Vocabulary

Students use the appropriate vocabulary to express their views and narrate the procedures and their findings at every level.

The characteristic of verbal expression and how practices in Students Quality Circles support them is amazing. If these steps are taken consciously by the coordinators or facilitators of the Circles then the utility of SQCs will be enhanced many folds. It is interesting to know that apparently distant fields of English Language Teaching and Total Quality Management have so much in common.