Totoy Andrea

1. CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES IN
COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING
Accuracy Vs Fluency
Fluency:
 Use a natural language
 Speakers engaged in meaningful
interaction
 Use communication strategies
 Avoid communication breakdowns
 Correct misunderstandings

2. Activities focusing on fluency
 Focus on achieving communication
 Require meaningful use of language
 Communication strategies
 Produce language that may not be predictable
 Seek to link language use to context

3. Accuracy
 Focuses on creating correct examples of language.
 Use the correct grammar and vocabulary
 Involve correct pronunciation
 A lot of practice

4. Activities focusing on fluency
 Reflect classroom use of language
 Correct examples of language
 Practice language out of context
 Practice small samples of language
 Not meaningful communication
 Control choice of language

5. Practices (CLT)
Mechanical practice
 Controlled practice activity.
 Repetition and substitution drills.
 Use of particular grammatical .
Meaningful practice
 Language control is still provided
 Students are required to make meaningful choices
Communicative Practice
 Activities to use the language within a
real communicative context
 Real information

6. Littlewood (1981)
Pre-communicative activities
 Structural and Quasi-communicative activities
Communicatives activities
Functional communication
activities
Social interactional activities
Students use their language
resources to overcome an
information gap or solve a
problem.
The student pays attention to
context and the roles of people to
respond with formal or informal
language

7. Information - Gap Activities
 Real communication to get information.
 Vocabulary, grammar, and communication strategies to complete a task.
Example:
 Students are divided into pairs A-B.
 Students A have a group of images.
 Students B has similar images but with
slight differences.
 Students have to turn their backs and try
to find the differences through questions.

8. Jigsaw activities
Based on the information-gap principle.
Example:
 The teacher divides a story into as
many sections as there are students
in the class.
 Each student gets a section of the story.
 Students must move through the class to
find out which part of the story their section
belongs to.
 Finally, the students have to assemble
the whole story correctly.

9. OTHER ACTIVITY TYPES IN CLT
Task-completion activities:
 Puzzles, games, map-reading
 Focus in used language resources to
complete a task.
Information-gathering activities:
 Student-conducted surveys, interviews,
and searches
 Use of linguistic resources to
collect information.
Opinion-sharing activities:
 Compare values,opinions,or beliefs

10. OTHER ACTIVITY TYPES IN CLT
Information-transfer activities:
 Take information that is presented in one form,
and represent it in a different form.
Reasoning-gap activities:
 These involve deriving new information from
given information (inference, practical reasoning)
Role plays:
 Students are assigned roles and
improvise a scene given
information or clues

11. EMPHASIS ON PAIR AND GROUP WORK
Classroom tasks in CLT (designed to be carried out in
pairs or small groups)
Several benefits:
 Learn from hearing the language
 Produce a greater amount of language.
 Motivation level increases.
 Develop fluency

12. The Push for Authenticity
Clarke and Silberstein
 Classroom activities should parallel the “real world.”
Use of authentic materials include:
 Cultural information about the
target language.
 Exposure to real language.
 Related to learners’ need.
 Creative approach to teach.

13. Widdowson
 It is not important if materials are derived from authentic texts.
 Learning processes will be authentic.
Criticism of authentic materials:
 Created materials are superior to authentic materials.
 Materials can also be motivating for learners.
 Authentic materials have difficult and
irrelevant language.
 Using authentic materials is a
burden for teachers

14. Tasks
 Can you give examples of fluency and accuracy activities that you use in
your teaching?
 For example the fluency activities that I can apply can be role plays or
free writings to reflect the use of natural language. Then, the accuracy
activities that I can apply can be sentence completions or model & drill to
use the correct grammar and vocabulary.
 Can you find examples of activities that provide mechanical, meaningful,
and communicative practice? What type of activities predominate?
 The predominant activities are mechanical activities because the text is
mainly focused on grammar rules and vocabulary.

15. Tasks
 What are some advantages and limitations of pair and group work in the
language classroom?
 The advantages to work in groups are develop a fluency communication,
collective learning and create more opportunities to interact. The
disadvantages can be the creation of internal conflicts between the
learners, the creation of competitiveness and an incorrect acquisition of
language.
 How useful do you think authentic materials are in the classroom? What
difficulties arise in using authentic materials?
 I think the authentic materials can be useful when the class is boring and
the teacher needs the creative material to engage the learners. The
difficulties could be the lack to preparation because not is based in
syllabus .