It is the last stage we are concerned with in the present paper. It is in the stage of execution where the student should demonstrate how well he masters the oral language. There is a fact to think of here: there is not always a balance between "input" and "output".

That is why several authors have insisted on a distinction between the" input"

the learner receives and the learner’s" intake", that is, what he is able to take in. So his "output" will depend, to a large extent, on his" intake".

The complexity of this process led us to ask the following questions: what is the appropriate form of spoken language to teach? How important is pronunciation?

Is it appropriate to teach the same structure to all foreign students, no matter their age or their reasons for learning the spoken language?

Are those structures considered standard the ones which our students should be expected to produce when they speak?

Is the oral practice we give the students enough for producing the spoken English? Is correctness, in its full sense, attainable? As a result of our teaching, are our students proficient in the use of the spoken language?

These rhetorical questions allow us to confirm that the teaching of the spoken language is really a worrying matter. Therefore, we should analyze up to what extent we should demand of our students to be accurate and proficient while using the spoken language, mainly if we analyze the context and conditions in which we teach them the language, as well as the fact that we ourselves are non native speakers.

It is our task to demand of the students’ correctness in their performance while using the language orally. But how do we measure this "correctness"?

In this case, we generally follow the assumption that the sentence is the appropriate unit of planning and performance. However, if we analyze native speakers’ performance, we can easily notice that it is generally characterized by the production of bursts of speech or phrases.

Then we may consider that it is not fair to demand of our students to produce complete sentences. It is clear that we should make the students be aware of their errors. Yet, it is not always possible since in our category of non native speakers, we may not be able to detect those errors.

The following extract from Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw can make us understand the concept of "correctness" in the foreign language much better:

Even native speakers agree on points of correctness demanded to second or foreign language learners that they do not follow in many cases.

Let us analyze the phenomenon from the point of view of the communication goal. No one dare to deny that while communicating there is a transfer of meaning from one person to another and that that meaning can be expressed in different ways. Abbot has described communication as:

In review , communicative goals are best achieved by giving due attention to language use and not just usage, to fluency and not just accuracy, to authentic language and contexts, and to students’ needs to apply classroom learning to heretofore unrehearsed contexts in the real world.(Douglas, 1989)

We teachers are concerned with the fact that it is not easy to measure the students’ performance during the production stage as it was during the practice stage, where we concentrate our attention mainly on accuracy.

There is evidence that the acquisition of native like production by non native like speakers may take years and in most of the cases, it may never be attained in foreign language teaching, communication is more likely to attain than correctness (or accuracy). Therefore, we state our modest consideration that we should not drown ourselves in a sea of corrections to have the students produce the language accurately but communicatively.