SQC and Fluency

SQC and Fluency
Abdul Wahid Mir,

Director General, WCTQEE, Pakistan.
modernages@hotmail.com
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 socio-
cultural 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 problem-
solving-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.

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SQC and Fluency

Abdul Wahid Mir,

Students Quality Circles give students an opportunity to discover their latent

The same way fluent speakers also know:

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