Classroom Activities in Communicative Language Teaching

Classroom Activities in CLT

teachers and materials writers have sought to find ways of developing classroom activities that reflect the principles of a communicative methodology.

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Accuracy Versus Fluency Activities

Fluency is natural language use occurring when a speaker engages in meaningful interaction and maintains comprehensible and ongoing communication despite limitations in his or her communicative competence.

Fluency is developed by creating classroom activities in which students must negotiate meaning, use communication strategies, correct misunderstandings, and work to avoid communication breakdowns.

Task8 give examples of fluency &accuracy

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Mechanical, Meaningful Practice

Mechanical practice refers to a controlled practice activity which students can successfully carry out without necessarily understanding the language they are using.

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Meaningful practice

refers to an activity where language control is still provided but where students are required to make meaningful choices when carrying out practice

Task9

 Examine the activities in one unit of a course book. Can you find examples of activities that provide mechanical, meaningful, and communicative practice? What type of activities predominate?      

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Information-Gap Activities

This refers to the fact that in real communication, people normally communicate in order to get information they do not possess. This is known as an information gap.

Jigsaw activities

These are also based on the information-gap principle. Typically, the class is divided into groups and each group has part of the information needed to complete an activity. The class must fit the pieces together to complete the whole.

Other Activity Types in CLT

-Task-completion activities -Information-gathering activities -Opinion-sharing activities -Information-transfer activities -Reasoning-gap activities -Role plays

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Task 10

What are some advantages and limitations of pair and group work in the language classroom?

1. The quantity of learner speech can increase. 2. The variety of speech acts can increase. 3. There can be more individualization of instruction. 4. Motivation can increase. 5. Independence can increase. 6. Social integration can increase. 7. Students can learn how to work together with others.

The Push for Authenticity

Some argued that classroom activities should as far as possible mirror the real world and use real world or “authentic” sources as the basis for classroom learning.

Others argued that it is not important if classroom materials themselves are derived from authentic texts and other forms of input, as long as the learning processes they facilitated were authentic.

Task 11

How useful do you think authentic materials are in the classroom? What difficulties arise in using authentic materials?

Yes They are very useful because they provide situational language and students are exposed to real discourse. Not only are they interesting for learners but are also very helpful in developing social language skills. Authentic materials develop creativity among teachers as well as learners and are highly motivating, and the difficulties can be bring the materials to the classroom.