Types of Activities in CLT By Karla Erika García Luis

Practical activities 1. Mechanical practice 2. Meaningful practice 3. Communicative practice (Richards, 2005)

Mechanical practice A controlled practice activity which students can successfully carry out without necessarily understanding the language they are using e.g. repetition drills, substitution drills

Meaningful practice An activity where language control is still provided but where students are required to make meaningful choices when carrying out practice e.g. Given a street map, students are asked questions (e.g. Where is the book shop?, Where is the cafe?)

Communicative practice Activities where practice in using language within a real communicative context is the focus, where real information is exchanged, and where the language used is not totally predicatable. e.g. Students might have to draw a map of their neighbourhood and answer questions about the location of different palces in their neighbourhood.

Communicative Methodological Framework (Littlewood,1981:86) Structural activities Pre-communicative activities Quasi-communicative activities Functional communication activities Communicative activities Social interaction activities

Pre-communicative activities • Aim: to give the learners fluent control over linguistic forms, so the learners will produce language which is acceptable • Function: to prepare the learner for later communication. • The teacher may begin the teaching with a communicative activity • Pre-communicative activities: drills, question-and-answer practice

Communicative activities • Aims: (a) to provide ‘whole-task practice’, (b) to improve motivation, (c) to allow natural learning, and (d) to create a context which supports learning • Functional communication activities: comparing sets of pictures and noting similarities and differences, following directions, discovering missing features in a map or picture • Social interaction activities: conversation and discussion sessions, dialogues and role plays, simulations, debates

The roles of teachers and learners in the classroom activities • Learners are expected to take on a greater degree of responsibilty for their own learning. Students interact with each other • Teachers play roles as facilitator and monitor

Clarke & Silbertstein (in Richards, 2005): ‘Classroom activities should parallel the ‘real world’ as closely as possible. Since language is a tool of communication, methods, and materials should concentrate on the message and not the medium. The purposes of reading should be the same in class as they are in real life’.

Type of Activities in CLT Role play is an important communicative activity. It allows your students to practice the target language in a safe environment where mistakes are no big deal.

Type of Activities in CLT 2. The Talk Show Interview Here, students will experience what it’s like being the host of a talk show or being the guest answering questions in front of a live studio audience.

Types of Activities in CLT 3. Objectified Have students draw from rolled sheets of paper containing names of different objects. Their job, using the target language, is to describe and give plenty of hints so that the class can discover what the object is.

Type of Activities in CLT 4. What I YouTubed Last Weekend Let your students tell about the most awesome thing they’ve seen on YouTube over the weekend. The only catch is that they should do this in the target language.

5. News Reporting Let the students choose a topic of their liking. They could choose to report on sports, politics, business, showbiz, lifestyle— anything they might see reported on TV. But unlike their favorite CNN anchors, they won’t be reading from a script. They’ll have to commit their piece to memory to really tell a story! A 30-second clip would be more than enough.