Instituto de Estudios Superiores

John F. Kennedy

Analysis Classroom Activities

Celta Course Training

Josue Miranda Amador

Analysis of classroom tasks

One of the advantages of being teacher is the possibility to think and decide the kind of
activities that students will develop in order to develop the four skills of English language.
Activities inside the classroom play the most important role in the

development of

those skills, as teachers we must to plan Particular tasks which will be set in the students
context , in order to learners achieve some kind of skills.
One of those activities is Dialogues, which are an important resource in the
improvement of speaking and listening skills because it gives students the opportunity to
exchange personal information and break interactional barriers. This task has some
advantages, because speaking is the product of creative construction of linguistic sequence,
it means, the speaker makes choices of vocabulary,estructure and discourse. Dialogues can
be an activity as free as teacher decides, although, sometimes teachers get wrong when they
give students the control of this kind of activities, letting them to do their own dialogue and
not giving parameters to evaluate.
When lower level students practice Dialogues created by themselves, it could not be real
communication and the other thing is that teacher actually control the studentsoutput, in
addition, adult students could have problems trying to decide in the speech and the
cohesion of the dialogue.
Another kind of useful task is drill, Drills in speaking involves as well listening skill
first. This task is really useful for adults because many adults are insecure about

pronunciation and intonation. As teachers it is important to model the language producing

the correct phenemes using chunks of language, stress patterns, etc.
We can develop speaking and listening skills through drills and break adult students
barriers to produce the language.
An activity that teachers enjoy a lot is find someone who because it reinforce at least
three of four skills (listening, speaking and reading) and it is a good opportunity for adult
students to know other students hobbies, abilities, dislikes, knowledge, vocabulary, besides
this task considers Linguistic, Kinesthetic and interpersonal intelligences.
During the development of this kind of task, teachers must take into consideration the
number of participants in order to control the duration and effectiveness of the task.
Sometimes this task is not as enjoyable to adult students interests because they are not
as sociable as children and they are insecure of producing the language and interviewing
different classmates and break social barriers.
This kind of tasks represents important resources and techniques when students need to
improve productive skills, but teachers must designed these tasks properly, in order to
provide positive reinforcement and experiences to adult students to speak naturally.

References
Language Assessment principles and Classroom techniques Longman
Brown D.