The Impact of Rhetorical Argumentation on Achieving the Mastery of Fluency and Accuracy in Communicative Competence: A Case Study of 2 nd Year Students at the University Des Frères Mentouri, Constantine

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 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 a test which was used to evaluate three main areas which are: classroom interaction, topic knowledge and language knowledge. 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.