Accuracy applied most often to grammar features. The idea apparently is that phonetic accuracy is too hard or not necessary and that items like verb endings can be memorized and manipulated intellectually/cognitively and easily tested (how do you “test” for a dental as opposed to alveolar ‘t’?). Most often, grammatical accuracy is advocated as the sine qua non of communication, when in actual fact, tests indicate variable communicativity (?) depending on the grammatical item. The irritability factor for a native speaker can be taken into account, too.
So what is accuracy? One definition I have heard was about grammar itself and stated that grammar ensures meaning.
Accuracy applied most often to grammar features. The idea apparently is that phonetic accuracy is too hard or not necessary and that items like verb endings can be memorized and manipulated intellectually/cognitively and easily tested (how do you “test” for a dental as opposed to alveolar ‘t’?). Most often, grammatical accuracy is advocated as the sine qua non of communication, when in actual fact, tests indicate variable communicativity (?) depending on the grammatical item. The irritability factor for a native speaker can be taken into account, too.
So what is accuracy? One definition I have heard was about grammar itself and stated that grammar ensures meaning. Therefore, we might say that accuracy in grammar use ensures meaning. I may want to say that there is more than one of an item and so I must use the plural form. But when we look at many languages, we find that some do not mark plurality normally, routinely, but rather only when it is necessary. Then we look at speakers of English as a second language and find that many of them do not mark plurals ordinarily but still communicate well. For some of us, it boils down to this: we want to assimilate, i.e. to be as much like our native-speaker models as possible.
For the classroom teacher, the dilemma is how much accuracy to call for. If on a test a student writes The traveler founded a small town, we mark it wrong because we know he met ‘found’ as in ‘came upon’, not ‘established’. But we might overlook an error like The traveler went down all the road until he reached the town, esp if the focus of the test was on using past tense verbs. If the student is doing free, spontaneous writing, we might not bother to correct The traveler went down the whole road until he reached the town. The teacher might say to himself, “It’s not idiomatic but I understand and I want the student to keep trying to express himself, so I’ll accept it and comment on the contents only.”
A concern with error has sometimes caused teachers to carefully restrict student production. A good deal of that comes out of the fossilization theory [which see], fearing once used a form becomes embedded. But teachers feel their students will have more success if they stick to carefully rehearsed and practiced forms. In that case, students are often reduced to producing set exercises where they write words in proper, preset grammar forms. What is gained in accuracy causes a loss of expressivity. Even in the teaching of English writing to native-speakers, U.S. schools have seen the pendulum swing from an emphasis on “mechanics” to one on expressivity with not very good results under both regimes.
Comments on how to encourage accuracy without turning the language into a mere exercise will be welcomed.