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

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.


Introduction
The act of speaking a foreign language is an important aspect in learning (Nunan, 1984;Brumfit, 1984). Unlike writing, where learners have plenty of time to plan their ideas and transform them into coherent messages, the act of speaking is done very quickly. Learners barely find time to plan what to say next, or how to say it appropriately, efficiently and correctly. In addition, communicating in a foreign language does not only involve planning what to say next, but also setting objectives, negotiating the meaning, and being understood. Bygate (1987) considered speaking in his model of communication as a process with more individual orientation rather than social. Speaking is a connection of three components namely: planning, selection, and production. Roberts and Kirsner (2000) discussed the importance of macro-planning in different communicative situations. They agree that the more macro-planning a communicative situation requires, the more vulnerable speech is to hesitation phenomenon when it comes to processing information and language altogether. Levelt (1989) indicated that speaking is based on conceptualization, formulation, articulation, and self-monitoring. A remarkable recent work has been conducted by Vercellotti (2012) when she tried to combine complexity, accuracy and fluency. This study has shown the way they are connected and the way they are measured in second language speaking, as they are affected by the structure of the language and level of proficiency. Therefore, the speaking skill is not only difficult to learn but also difficult to assess, since it is composed of different competencies including grammatical, pragmatic, discourse and strategic competence. This has created a thorny issue among speaking test specialists (Bachman & Palmer, 1996;Luoma, 2004;Weir, 2005) as they are still investigating the relationship between scales, scores, and the components of speaking. language when they are used systematically "accuracy is performative knowledge of the language or linguistic 'know-how'." In the same line of thought, Spratt, Pulveness, and Williams (2005:34) regarded accuracy as: "the use of correct forms of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation." The systematization of learning a language is based on diagnosing errors, and applying instructional discourse to teach directly the grammar rules, and to explicitly practice the language out of the realm of context. Therefore, accuracy is the correct use of grammatical structures, choice of words, and extensive use of tenses, as the ability to produce correct grammatical sentences may not include the ability to speak fluently. More than that, accuracy is not only about grammatical rules, Amedeo (2000) explored a number of other components of accuracy which refer to the appropriateness and correct form of various sociolinguistic and pragmatic devices used to negotiate the meaning. Accuracy here is a matter of duplicating correct sentences in correct situations and contexts to achieve comprehensibility. Brumfit (1984:52) defined accuracy in terms of use and he said: It simply refers to a focus by the user, because of the pedagogical context created or allowed by the teacher, on formal factors or issues of appropriacy, which will be evaluated for their observed characteristics rather than ignored…except in so far as they impede satisfactory completion of the discourse.
Brumfit characterizes accuracy as its role in teaching, when accuracy and structures are used to develop language skills successfully if impeded in the appropriate learning context. Brumfit distinguished also between accuracy and fluency according to the type of activities achieved in the classroom. The following table summarizes the main components of accuracy: Correct pronunciation of words, with the right stress position, syllable recognition and intonation. Lexicon The right choice of words, together with the use of collocations, correct spelling, and recognition of word meaning. Grammar rules Mastery of the use of tenses, correct word order and sentence structure free of mistakes. Prosodic features Rhythm, pitch sounds (consonants and vowels)

Definition of Fluency
Fluency by definition is the flow and organization of speech. There have been so many disagreements about the nature and characterization of fluency depending on the context and its use. Brumfit (1984) regarded fluency to be natural language use, as it is used by native speakers without any interruptions or pauses. One of the most cohesive definitions of fluency was mentioned by Pawley and Syder (1983: 191) in their study; they conceptualized fluency as "the native speaker's ability to produce fluent stretches of discourse." This point of view was taken from a native-like performance during speaking in natural situations. Fillmore (1979: 93) identified fluency by four abilities which are subsumed in speaking, the first of which is the ability to talk at length with few pauses and to "fill time with talk". The second is the "ability to talk in coherent, reasoned and 'semantically dense' sentences". The third is "the ability to have appropriate things to say in a wide range of contexts." The last one is to "be creative and imaginative in language use." Hence, fluency is a matter of speaking without pauses, with good semantic mastery, and in a variety of contexts.

The Components of Fluency
The testing of fluency is judged from the performance of the learner with the other interlocutors in different social settings. The assessor generally divides what has been said, to understand what is meant, or to find out a criterion for evaluating connected speech. The point is that, this division allows the assessor to diagnose the learners' mistakes and their positions, and even categorize the mistakes into different types, each category is assessed alone.

Speed of Delivery
Speed of delivery is identified by the informants and their capacity to produce words per minute. Freed (1995) argued that speed of delivery has something to do with exposure and repetition. Learners may acquire language very easily if they are exposed to it, and the same expressions are used repeatedly either by the learner himself or by other people like classmates and the teacher in the case of classroom environment. It is argued by researchers in second language acquisition that speed of delivery is a characterization of native-like speaking, and that native speakers' language production is automatic, and it contains fewer pauses and interruptions. In a study, Lennon (1990) tried to prove that language production and speed of delivery are highly related to exposure, he studied the improvement of four German students, who resided in England for a period of one year, Lennon noticed three important indices of improvement in the students' language proficiency which are: the quality of speech, the rate of speech and the fewer number of pauses used to separate units of speaking. Speed of delivery is based on the rate of speech, as the decrease of pauses like (ehm, err, ah) and the increase of unit production mainly per minute.

Hesitation Phenomena
The hesitation phenomena represents a number of factors which influence the production of language and speech rate in general, these factors are: pauses, fillers, hesitations, repetitions, luck of discourse markers and sentence connectives. Skehan (2001) considered these aspects as the most comprehensive picture of fluency performance since it is a combination of what should be measured in fluency.

Pauses
A pause may occur to indicate the end of the turn especially when the utterance ends in low key, and is associated with fillers like: um, er, or uhu. In some other cases pauses are used to plan for what to say next when the idea is in the mind but the learner is still looking for the right words to express it clearly. Fulcher (2003:101)

Fillers
Fillers can be viewed as words or expressions learners use whenever confronted with a difficult pronunciation of some words, or to buy him some time to plan what to say and how to say it. There are a large number of expressions of such kind like: uhm, er, euh….. They are unfinished words or the beginning of words.

Repetitions
Repetitions occur with repeated syllables, words or phrases and the repeated word does not add any propositional content to the utterance. Generally speaking, a pause occurs between the word and its repetition which stands for another missing or unfound word. Heike (1980) draw a distinction between prospective and retrospective repetition. Prospectives are classified as those introduced because of perceived upcoming difficulty for the speaker. While retrospectives occur when the speaker detects that a problem has already occurred. The repetition here is needed to establish fluency of speech.

Hesitations
Hesitation in speech is always marked by fillers, pauses and prolongations of words these features are remarkably common in most continuous speaking. These features affect both the processing of speech and the lasting representation of the material. Hesitation is due to the increase in the difficulty in conceptualizing utterances when hesitations like word prolongations are produced very frequently (Schnadt and Corley, 2006).

Planning and Organization
Fluency in not only tied to the number of utterance produced and the number of hesitations produced to separate the utterances and to correct mistakes. It includes also the capacity to transform the message from ideas into words and utterances joined together. Planning in speaking is not that easy, the speaker does not have much time to plan what to say next, specifically when the mind is totally engaged in connecting the lexical items together, to construct new knowledge from the acquired background knowledge. As it has been mentioned before, Levelt (1989) explained what happens when the information is processed in the mind using schema knowledge, planning the information, and transforming it into lexical items. At the beginning of the planning stage, the speaker conceptualizes the ideas in an attempt to organize them coherently, and to choose one option to say the right thing in the right way. Then, the speaker formulates his schema knowledge according to the goals and objectives of the intended message. At the end, fluency reflects accuracy and complexity.

Rhetorical Argumentation
Rhetorical argumentation is a type of verbal and non verbal communication where individuals achieve a number of communicative purposes like: arguing, convincing, suggesting, illustrating, giving examples and evaluating knowledge. As a matter of fact, argumentation is used in everyday life as a critical thinking which is used to defend a standpoint, while in academic contexts it is viewed by Freeley and Steinberg (2009:2) as "reason given in communicative situations by people whose purpose is the justification of acts, believes, attitudes and values." Communicators adhere to reasonable arguments in different communicative situations; these arguments determine the negotiation of meaning of the task of rhetorical argumentation.

Argumentation as a Process and as a Product
Johnson (2000:154) distinguished between argumentation as a product and argumentation as a process. He identified first argumentation as a product because it is viewed as the practice. The practice is divided into components which are "(a) the process of arguing (b) the agents engaged in the practice (the arguer and other), and (c) the argument itself as a product." These components complete each other and design the end result of the product, and the product is something that is ought to be finished.
On the other hand, the argumentation process is the development of certain norms used to create credibility for whatever reasons justified and clarified automatically. These norms are preceded by a plan, when it is used to organize the reasons and ensure the flow of reasons in a logical way. The reasons in the process of argumentation carry out different communicative function like persuading, justifying, claiming and explaining. The end result of the process is the product, and the product of argumentation is evaluated valid or invalid when there is some effect over the audience because every argumentative element in the process is supposed to play a specific role.
Fluency and rhetorical argumentation share a lot of organizational patterns like planning what to say next, the organization of information and both of them are typically involved in the negotiation of meaning in a wide variety of contexts.

Sampling
The subjects in this research are 65 second year students enrolled at the department of English at the university des Fresé s Mentouri. The subjects belong to two different groups, 35 students represent the experimental group and 30 students represent the control group. The subjects studied English for two years through which they were exposed to different subjects including Grammar, Written Expression, and Oral Expression. Thus, we expected them to possess average communicative competence to be tested in the experiment.

Procedures
First of all, we taught the experimental group all about argumentation and how to use it in different academic contexts. Then, the field work was implemented in a classroom test. The teacher-researcher conducted a classroom test to measure the learner's behaviours and to obtain a general evaluation of their classroom performances. This test was done in a period of a 5 weeks and this equals 20 sessions, if we consider four sessions each week. The activity throughout the test was the same, and the students together with the teacher-researcher discussed a variety of topics.
The topics discussed with the experimental group were not the same as those discussed by the control group. The reason is that, the teacher intended to make the topics different, by means of subjecting argumentative topics for the experimental group, and other types of topics (descriptive, narrative…etc.) for the control group. By doing this, we vary data collection obtained from the test since it is based on two approaches in the discussion of the topics. The teacher prepared in advance an evaluation checklist for both the experimental group and the control group, and this check list was the same in every single session. It was divided into three main parts: -The first part is about Classroom Interaction which is composed of: participation, seriousness, and motivation.
-The second part represents language knowledge were two important components in our research stand up for language knowledge: they are accuracy and fluency.
-Part three represents Topic knowledge which includes: rhetorical functions, Schema Knowledge (ideas), planning and organization.

Analysis
The calculation of the relationship between the variables accuracy and fluency with the task rhetorical argumentation is based on Pearson`s correlation coefficient. Here, the variables accuracy and fluency for experimental group performances are referred to as XY, and X 2 Y 2 for the control group. In order to prove the relationship between the variables and the tasks, the value of Pearson` correlation coefficient should be as high as (+1) if the relationship is positive, because when it is negative, the value should be as high as (-1). Altogether, other calculations including variance, t-test, and determination are made to prove the validity or invalidity of the tasks. All these statistics are made after the analysis of the performance of students in the test in the aspects classroom interaction, language knowledge, topic knowledge. After evaluating the students for a period of a month, we obtained the following results concerning the three aspects: classroom interaction, language knowledge and topic knowledge. We intended to shed some light on these aspects to recognize the weaknesses and strengths of the students in both groups, and to investigate the speaking skill as it is demonstrated in real life situations and under the effects of both tasks. The results of classroom interaction for the ten observed sessions are summarized in the following table: In the above table we compare between the overall rates of classroom interaction for both the control group and the experimental group. The results were unexpected, in the control group the table shows that the students have actually participated, despite the divergence between the rates in each session (see tables 1, 3, and 5) the means of their participation reached 47.3% with a divergence of -2.7% from the medium. Concerning the rates of seriousness and motivation are a bit lower than participation. The mean of seriousness is 46.5% with a divergence of -3.5 from the medium, and the mean of motivation is 45.7% with a divergence of -4.3 from the medium.

Classroom Interaction
The experimental group performed better in terms of participation and motivation but not seriousness. The mean of participation reached 48.6% with a lower divergence from the medium -1.4, while the mean of motivation is 47.1% with a divergence of -2.9% from the medium, against only 42.8% for seriousness with divergence of -7.2 from the medium.  Table 3 shows the divergences and the means observed for language knowledge. The teacher noticed that there is no direct contribution of the rates obtained in classroom interaction over the aspects of language knowledge; the rates obtained in the above table are tied to performance no matter how serious and motivated the students are. The mean of accuracy is only 25.8% from the medium, with a high divergence of -24.2%, and the mean of fluency is 34.4% from the medium, which has a -15.6% divergence rate.

Language Knowledge
The experimental group obtained higher means in both fluency and accuracy, and accordingly lower divergences. The mean of accuracy reached 28.5% from the medium with a divergence of -21.5%, concerning fluency the mean reached 35.6% from the medium with a -14.4% divergence. The results shown in table 4 represent proportions of the rhetorical functions, which were used to brainstorm and generate ideas in the discussion. The results vary across both groups, and across all rhetorical functions, the mean of the use of explanation is 38.7% in the control group with a divergence of -11.3%, while it is only 14.2% in the experimental group with a divergence of -35.8%. Evidently, the context and the communicative purposes of the topic determine to a large extent the rhetorical functions used to manage the message, and this is clear in the results obtained by both groups for the other rhetorical functions. The mean of exposition is 12.05% with a divergence of -37.9% from the medium, against no use of it in the experimental group. The use of rhetorical argumentation is by no means poor in the control group since it is only 6% with a divergence of -44%, in contrast the mean of rhetorical argumentation is 40.9% in the control group with a divrgence-9.1% from the medium. This shows the nature and the types of discourses created with the experimental group. The control group used only one aspect of argumentation which is justification, because it provides easy presentation of ideas, and the mean of justification is 6.9% and the divergence is -43.1% from the medium.
Concerning the experimental group, the mean of justification was not satisfying as it is only 17.6% with a divergence of -32.4%. In addition to justification, the experimental group used another rhetorical function which is persuasion; the mean of persuasion is 9.3% with a high divergence from the medium 40.7%. The control group used two more rhetorical functions and they are clarification and exemplification, the mean of clarification is 3.4% with a high divergence of -46.6%, and the mean of exemplification is 13.7% with a divergence of -36.3%. The experimental group used exemplification whenever necessary and this is particularly clear in the big difference between the low mean 2.55% and the high divergence of -47.4% from the medium.
In table number 4, schema knowledge was divided into three levels of proficiency which are poor, fair and good. In terms of this, the experimental group obtained better results than the control group and at all levels of proficiency.
The mean of the control group for the level of proficiency 'poor' is 38.7% with a divergence of only 11.3%, in contrast the experimental group achieved a bit better as the mean is 33.5% with a higher divergence of 16.55% from the medium. In the level of proficiency 'fair', the mean of the control group is 34.4% with a divergence of 15.6%, while the mean of the experimental group is 37.8% with a divergence of 12.2% from the medium. In the last proficiency level, the mean of good ideas is 26.6% in the control group and the divergence is 23.4%, while the mean of the experimental group is 28.6% with a divergence of 21.4% from the medium.  Table 5 shows that the correlation between fluency, accuracy and argumentation is confirmed as it is demonstrated in the table at the levels X Y with a correlation of 0.75. Meanwhile, the correlation between fluency, accuracy and the tasks of narrating and describing is also confirmed because the control group obtained slightly better results than the experimental group. Henceforth, the results obtained do not match the aims of this study as both rhetorical argumentation and narrating stories are equally important.

Discussion of the Results
Despite being serious more than the control group, this is shown in table two, and even though they got almost the same means in terms of motivation and participation with the experimental group; the latter managed to achieve slightly better results from the control group in accuracy and fluency. The means of the control group in both accuracy and fluency are 25.8% and 34.5%, while the means of the experimental group are 28.5% and 35.6% respectively. The rates show how problematic fluency and accuracy are for the students; their speaking is characterized by a lot of interruptions and pauses in fluency. This is the result of lack of knowledge, and the absence of planning and organization. Concerning accuracy, the students tend to commit mistakes at the lexical, grammatical and the phonological levels. Besides, they over emphasis the use of small talk such as short questions or unfinished sentences, and there are always interventions of other students who intrude the discussion and add comments and ideas.
As a general comparison, the task of narrating stories is achieved within the framework of the rhetorical functions of narration and description. This limited framework of the rhetorical functions enables the students to achieve the intended communicative purposes of the task. The students of the control group used the rhetorical function of explaining (the rates are indicated in table 4) to clarify the meaning of new expressions, words, and sentences. Despite the fact that they can include too many examples in narrating stories, but they provided few examples in describing people and places. Finally, the low rates of rhetorical argumentation indicated in table 4 show little use of argumentation except for few disputes over the real events of common shared stories.
On the contrary, the task of rhetorical argumentation 'as described' was difficult to handle. It contains a number of communicative purposes, and it is based on explanations and examples to support the main ideas. Unfortunately, the students did not employ as much examples as required while the rates of the rhetorical function of explaining are convincing. The difficulty of the task rhetorical argumentation and the lack of ideas planning shuttered the focus of the students between producing the ideas, explaining them, and giving opposing arguments on the one hand, and speaking English fluently and accurately on the other hand. Henceforth, they used few examples and illustrations to help in the realization of different meanings in different contexts. The task of rhetorical argumentation is procedural in nature, and it requires organization during the transformation of information. The latter is based on three rhetorical functions: "stating" or "identifying" the point of view (arguing), explaining the point of view and exemplifying or illustrating. Achieving fluency in the task rhetorical argumentation requires good mastery of accuracy and good topic knowledge. Since topic knowledge is available when narrating stories most of the complexity shifts from fluency to accuracy.

Conclusion
As a conclusion we can say that, developing fluency and accuracy is determined by the types of tasks practiced by the teacher in the classroom. Despite the inevitable correlation between both of them, some tasks are more suitable for accuracy than fluency and vice versa. As an example, it is easy to enrich vocabulary stock depending on tasks which resemble everyday life. On the other hand, fluency is divided into two types, automatic and procedural.
Automatic fluency is all about speaking quickly, but fluency does not mean all the time speaking quickly. In some academic contexts, proceduralization in fluency is required specifically when the task at hand is primarily concerned with the negotiation of meaning. Consequently, in this research we found a lot of similarities between fluency and argumentation, like planning what to say next, using connectives to connect sentences and ideas, distinguishing between language knowledge and topic knowledge and more importantly negotiating the meaning in different contexts.

Implications of the Study
The task of rhetorical argumentation is more provoking. This is particularly due to the nature of the task which grabs the students' attention and this led to more participation in the classroom. The main communicative event in the task of rhetorical argumentation is `the negotiation of meaning` which expresses exactly the same notion "negotiation of meaning" in fluency. The communicative purposes which underlie the negotiation of meaning are: arguing, judging, commenting, explaining, exemplifying and illustrating. However, negotiating the meaning in fluency is thinking about the topic, planning and organizing what to say next, and processing information smoothly. All these steps are characteristics of 'procedural fluency', and if they are practiced extensively in the classroom, the students thinking abilities improve and students may develop their topic knowledge and this, in turn, will lessen pauses and hesitations in fluency during speaking.
The task of narrating stories is less complex and less demanding when it comes to thinking about the topic, because it requires less planning and organizing what to say next and less information processing. Hence, during the task narrating stories students of the control group did not spend a lot of time to think about the topic, and organize the ideas smoothly, but they managed to narrate the stories automatically. The overall focus of the students in the task of narrating stories is to tell a story, and not to transform a message. Thus, information organization is not very important in this situation, and the students focus shifts from fluency to accuracy. The main communicative strategies employed by the students are "compensation" and "avoidance" strategies. Students avoided difficult grammar structures and difficult expressions of the original stories but they explained these expressions using their own words. Accordingly, this task does not assimilate real life communication, when turn-taking takes place between people in different contexts. Communication in real life is not only about telling stories. It takes place in different forms. We may argue, comment, suggest, recommend, invite, judge, propose, and give our point of view. All these forms of speaking are done when speakers accommodate between language knowledge and topic knowledge.