Activities Focusing on Communication
Substitute Teacher:
Ann, what am I doing? [The teacher picks up a book and starts reading it.]
Student A:
You are reading a book.
The teacher nods and motions for Ann to do something. She does, and the student next to
her says what she is doing. After all of the students have participated in this activity, the teacher
explains the present continuous to them. Rather than explaining the grammar rules in full, she
elicits as much information from the students as possible based on the previous activity.
Then, she gives them a task to complete that involves communicating with one another:
Substitute Teacher:
Now, each of you has a problem. You need to call another student to ask
him or her to help you. The student you call has to say what they are doing that stops them from
helping you. If their excuse makes sense, you move on and call another student. If not, that student
has to help you. Students cannot repeat activities. If they do, then they will have to help you.
The first student “calls” another student.
Student A
: Hi, Student B. I need someone to look after my daughter. Can you help me?
Student B
: No. I cannot because I am writing a report at work.
Student A:
Hi, Student C. I need someone to look after my daughter. Can you help me?
Student C
: No. I cannot because I am sleeping.
Student A:
You are not sleeping. You are talking to me.
This lesson gets students communicating with one another in a natural way. Native English
speakers call one another every day and ask them what they are doing. Or they call for help and if
the other party cannot help, they usually say why. What makes this activity even better is that the
students do not have a script. There is no way to predict what they are going to say. Students leave
a class like this feeling equipped to tell people what they are doing, and they cannot wait to come
to class to see what they are going to learn, in context, the next day.
Since its inception in the 1970s, communicative language teaching has passed through
a number of different phases. In its first phase, a primary concern was the need to develop a
syllabus and teaching approach that was compatible with early conceptions of communicative
competence. This led to proposals for the organization of syllabuses in terms of functions and
notions rather than grammatical structures. Later the focus shifted to procedures for identifying
learners’ communicative needs and this resulted in proposals to make needs analysis an essential
component of communicative methodology. At the same time, methodologists focused on the
kinds of classroom activities that could be used to implement a communicative approach, such as
group work, task work, and information-gap activities.
Some focus centrally on the input to the learning process. Thus content-based teaching stresses
that the content or subject matter of teaching drives the whole language learning process. Some
teaching proposals focus more directly on instructional processes. Task-based instruction for
example, advocates the use of specially designed instructional tasks as the basis of learning. Others,
such as competency-based instruction and text-based teaching, focus on the outcomes of learning
and use outcomes or products as the starting point in planning teaching. Today CLT continues in its
classic form as seen in the huge range of course books and other teaching resources that cite CLT
as the source of their methodology. In addition, it has influenced many other language teaching
approaches that subscribe to a similar philosophy of language teaching
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