Unit 2: Communicative Activities

Communicative Activities aren’t just speaking tasks which give oral practice. For real
communication we need interaction and an exchange of information, otherwise the speech is
meaningless. The only time you would ever describe a picture to someone already looking at that
picture, for example, would be in a classroom. So that’s not particularly authentic. But the
communicative approach is all about reflecting real-life situations which language-learners may be
faced with if they ever genuinely need to converse in English.

The reason that describing a picture to someone who can see it in front of them is not a
communicative activity but describing a picture to someone who can’t see it is, is because, here,
information is changing hands. In the second scenario, the students are interacting for a specific
purpose and one which could reflect reality if they had to describe something over the phone
say. There are many different types of communicative activities but they must include some kind
of information exchange and either reflect a real-life situation or reflect language that could be
exploited in a real-life situation. Some commonly-used ones are a variety of gap-fill style tasks,
spot the difference, problem-based discussions, board games and instruction giving.

Gap-fill
Aside from the non-communicative gap-fill tasks (such as completing sentences with the correct
form of the infinitive verb in brackets e.g. If the photos ____ good, I’ll send them to you. (be)),
there are many which can be used to promote effective communication. A good one is getting
students into pairs and giving them the same text but with different information missing from
each. They then have to ask questions to get the appropriate information from their partner to
complete their text.

There are many variations on this theme, including split crosswords, pictures with different items
missing from each, even timetables or schedules with different blank spaces. You may have to
monitor your students to make sure they don’t cheat though!

Spot the difference

A great task for practising detailed descriptions is a picture difference task (done by
communication, not looking, of course!). In this activity, pairs are given the same image with a
few slight differences, or big ones depending on the level of your class, and they have to find
them. Imagine you are a student, how would you describe image A to your partner?
Problem-based discussions
Problem-based discussions can be anything from ‘desert island scenarios’ to ranking the
importance of certain statements or ideas. In discussions such as these, the teacher really just acts
as a facilitator for the discussion, introducing the problem and the language needed to work on it
before putting students into small or larger groups. You then need to go around the class observing
and supporting, occasionally joining a group to stimulate discussion if necessary. It’s important
not to dictate though, as you want students to address the problem for themselves.

Board games

Board games are great in the EFL classroom because they can practise language in a really fun
way. There are lots of ready-made board games for English teaching or you can even create your
own using a template or your imagination! Introducing a competitive element always gets students
talking but to make sure the game is as communicative as possible you can incorporate cards
which get students to respond to questions but also ask someone else in the class. Check out this
great website for printable and editable games http://www.eslgamesworld.com/!

Unit 3: Error Correction

Sometimes it’s easy to think that because your students make errors that they’ve not understood,
or even that you’re a bad teacher. But this isn’t necessarily the case at all. Error can actually often
be a good thing because it shows that students are willing to experiment with the language as they
find out what works and what doesn’t.

In communicative classrooms it’s really important that students are allowed to communicate
without worrying about every tiny little detail of speaking accurately. That’s not to say, however,
that we should just let all their errors go unnoticed. After all, how would they improve if that was
the case? But there are certain techniques we can use to correct errors without destroying learner
confidence!

There are many different types of error that students can make when learning a language and these
can be either spoken or written. They may be to do with incorrect grammar (tenses, word order,
verb-noun agreement), lexis or pronunciation even. Or sometimes the language itself may be
correct but inappropriate in the situation given.

It’s also important to distinguish the difference between errors and mistakes/slip ups. An error is
when the student doesn’t know the correct form, whereas a mistake is something said incorrectly
by accident. If you correct every tiny little mistake then your students will probably become very
hesitant when speaking and always look to you for confirmation and this isn’t something you want
to encourage. It’s a balancing act though; be aware that repeated mistakes can turn into errors, so
still keep an eye on slips that crop up time and again. A lot of research into the best ways of
correcting students in the EFL classroom exists but all focus on three main areas:

 what to correct
 when to correct
 how to correct

What to correct
When deciding what exactly you should and shouldn’t correct, you need to think about your
lesson aims. Is the objective to work on a particular grammar point or is it a skills lesson? If it’s
the former, then yes, it can be constructive to correct your students because you’re working on
producing accuracy. However, if a student has made a few errors whilst speaking, it’s not always
necessary to correct every one. Instead, you should focus on errors made which relate to the target
language you’re studying that lesson. Especially for lower level students who are naturally going
to make several errors, you don’t want to overwhelm them, certainly if those errors relate to
something they haven’t even studied yet! Otherwise your correction isn’t particularly constructive.

For skills lessons (which focus on developing reading, writing, listening and speaking
proficiency), however, correction may not always be necessary. If the aim of the lesson is to
encourage fluency, then you jumping in to correct all the errors can really hinder this and will
actually work to obstruct your main goal of fluid spoken language. Sometimes students just need
to shake off their fear of speaking a foreign language and a good way to do this can be to say,
“okay for this exercise I just want you to speak as naturally as possible, don’t worry about making
mistakes, that’s not important today, the aim is just to develop your fluency.” A lot of learners
respond really well to this, others may be a bit sceptical, but the important thing is to let students
know that exercises like these can be very useful (and that there’s a reason why you’re not
correcting them, not that their language was absolutely perfect and they don’t need to improve at
all!).

When to correct
As we’ve mentioned, for fluency exercises it can be really inappropriate to interrupt students
while they’re speaking by jumping in with corrections. There are ways of correcting discreetly
during conversation classes/exercises but we’ll look at those in more detail in the next section. For
speaking tasks, we can therefore decide to correct at the end of the task, later on in the lesson or
not at all (as in the example above). If you decide to correct later then it’s important to use your
listening skills to note down any errors you overhear to discuss at a later stage or plan future tasks.

Choose an appropriate point to correct once the activity is over. With delayed correction, though,
you may want to make it anonymous so that students don’t feel embarrassed in front of their
classmates. There’s something about being singled out directly in this way that is never pleasant!
Aside from which, all students can always benefit from more generalised error correction: just
because it wasn’t them that particular time isn’t to say that they never make that error.

For accuracy activities you may also want to correct afterwards or possibly on-the-spot. This kind
of immediate correction can be a bit trickier and you have to be more careful so you don’t end up
jumping on the student or slow down the pace of the lesson too much. This requires you to be an
active listener and there are various techniques we can use to correct learner errors as we go along.
Barnett also suggests that by correcting in this way we can “give learners an experience of
partaking in meaningful dialogue” in order to inform and motivate them.

So once you’ve decided whether to correct or not and when exactly to do it, here are a few
different ways you can do it…

How to correct
There are several ways to correct errors as you go along but rather than saying outright what the
problem is, there are plenty of ways you can encourage student self-correction. This can simply be
through facial expressions; raised eyebrows, a frown, a look of surprise perhaps to show the
students that something is not quite right. If they need more prompting you can repeat the sentence
up to the error, for example ‘you were waiting for a…?’ or perhaps a more direct question such as
‘tense?’ or ‘pronunciation?’

Other methods include repeating the sentence but placing stress on the problem word, such as ‘last
week you go to the cinema?’ or even saying directly ‘there’s an error in that sentence’. Finger
correction is also a useful technique which involves holding up one hand and pointing to each
finger with the other as you say each word of the phrase. You can then hold on to the problem
finger/word or skip a finger to indicate a missing word.

If the student is unable to self-correct, though, we can use different types of

reformulating/recasting. This can be when we repeat a sentence but without drawing the student’s
attention to it directly, for example:
  Teacher “What did you do at the weekend?”
 Student “I go to the cinema with my friends”
 Teacher “Ah you went to the cinema, that’s nice. What did you see?”

We use this technique when we don’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation or discourage the
student from continuing to speak. To make it slightly clearer that an error has been made,
however, you can recast the sentence more obviously, for instance,

 Student “I’m not agree with Sara, I prefer skiing”

 Teacher “Oh, so you mean you don’t agree with Sara, you disagree with her. Why do you
prefer skiing?”

Even when using on-the-spot correction it’s a good idea to make a note of any problems to review
afterwards. Sometimes, when we correct students, they may still make the same mistake time and
again because they haven’t really absorbed the correction. That’s why it is good if you can prompt
them to self-correct because if they learn for themselves they tend to remember better. Yet, there
are ways of drilling error correction even when it was given by you, the teacher. Once you’ve laid
the groundwork in the initial task, you can do some drilling of the correct form afterwards:

 Teacher “Do you remember when you said ‘I’m not agree with Sara’? Yes? What did
I say instead?”
 Student “Erm, I don’t agree”
 Teacher “Good yes, who don’t you agree with”
 Student “Sara”
 Teacher “What about Sara, sorry?”
 Student “I don’t agree with her, with Sara”
 Teacher “Okay good, do you remember the other expression too? No? Okay well just
answer my questions. Do you agree with Sara?”
 Student “No”
 Teacher “What’s the opposite of ‘agree’? We can add a prefix to change the meaning.”
 Student “Oh yes, disagree”
 Teacher “So do you agree with Sara?”
 Student “No, I disagree with her.”

When using delayed correction, on the other hand, some of the methods already discussed can still
be employed (i.e. finger correction, one word questions), but you will obviously need to
reintroduce the problem sentence. You could use examples of errors the students made but unless
several class members said very similar incorrect sentences you may want to change the exact
phrases to make them more anonymous. Here, you could write the sentence on the board and ask
the class to identify the problem before eliciting the correction. Diagrams can help at this stage,
for example a line indicating past, present and future with an ‘x’ to mark ‘last weekend’, showing
that we can’t use “I go to the cinema with my friends” but instead need the past form of the verb.

If your students have just learnt a grammar rule then sometimes all it takes is repeating the rule
and perhaps modelling an example sentence. Or for pronunciation errors, you can indicate which
syllable should be stressed “Japan” not “Japan”. Sometimes it’s difficult to get students to self-
correct pronunciation because you automatically correct when you say the word! If your class is
familiar with the phonemic chart, however, you can indicate which sound they used and which
one is correct by pointing or drawing the symbol on the board.

Obviously any errors your students make in their writing have to be corrected afterwards, but
don’t be tempted to just give them everything on a plate; it is still possible to encourage self-
correction.
You could use a correction code like this and make a key at the beginning of the course for your
students to refer to. It will not only motivate them to discover and correct their own errors but will
save you time when marking.

So, before you jump in to correct a student’s error, think about the following things:

 is it appropriate to do so?
 is now the right time?
 can they self-correct with a bit of prompting?
 how can I correct without knocking their confidence? If you bear these things in mind,
hopefully your students will keep motivated and keep improving.