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In most classrooms, mobile phones are banned.

But in Becky Steven's and Jessica Cobley's English language classes, they are helping the students to speak fluently.

Ms Steven and Miss Cobley recently won an English Australia/Cambridge English award for their "ground-breaking use of technology" in an action research project.

At UWA's Centre for English Language Teaching (CELT), their students come from Colombia, France, Iraq, Japan and many more countries. The teachers are always trying out new ideas to help their students get a better grasp of English before most of them enrol at UWA.

"As teachers, we are doing ‘action research' every day in the classroom, to work out problems," Ms Steven said.

"But this project was a little different. English Australia provided us an opportunity for professional development and Cambridge English offered a prize for the best project," she said.

The pair chose to research oral fluency and the best way to develop it. They found some web based tools and applications on their smart phones which they knew their students would enjoy using.

"One of the Apps that Jessica found was a word counter, another was an Ah Counter. The students loved counting each other's fillers (ah, um, er) and interjections (y'know, like, basically) in class."

Ms Steven said the pair believed that fluency should come before accuracy when teaching English.

"Some people think you need to get all the words and phrasing correct before trying to have conversations and speed up your speech," she said. "But we think they need to keep talking and develop confidence, before concentrating on accuracy." This is where the word counter helped, comparing the students' words per minute from the beginning of the semester with the count at the end of semester.

They also used an online accent archive so the students could listen to different ways to speak English: quickly, slowly, with or without fillers and interjections.

"From this, students learned that even native English speakers have flaws!"

Ms Steven said most English language course books did not structure activities to develop fluency. "Most teachers believe it will just happen naturally with practice," she said. "But our work has shown great results, with the students attaining fluency much more quickly without developing bad speaking habits."

The teachers enjoyed the opportunity of attending three research training sessions with other English language teachers from around Australia and the chance to run their ideas by others working in the same field.

Their action research will be published in the University of Cambridge Research Notes next May.  The pair will present their research at a preconference workshop of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Harrogate, UK next year.

Miss Cobley and Ms Stevens received a trophy and a cheque for $1,500 and the Director of CELT, Bianca Panizza, arranged a presentation in front of their colleagues.

"Jessica was a technophile, and Becky was a technophobe. When the ‘phile' and the ‘phobe' came together, something wonderful happened," Ms Panizza said.

"We were honoured that Bianca enabled us to share this with our colleagues," Ms Steven said. "And we're grateful for the support CELT gave us to work on this project."