By Karla Erika García Luis

 1. Mechanical practice
 2. Meaningful practice
 3. Communicative practice (Richards, 2005)
 A controlled practice activity which students
can successfully carry out without necessarily
understanding the language they are using
 e.g. repetition drills, substitution drills
 An activity where language control is still
provided but where students are required to
make meaningful choices when carrying out
practice e.g. Given a street map, students are
asked questions (e.g. Where is the book
shop?, Where is the cafe?)
 Activities where practice in using language
within a real communicative context is the
focus, where real information is exchanged,
and where the language used is not totally
predicatable. e.g. Students might have to
draw a map of their neighbourhood and
answer questions about the location of
different palces in their neighbourhood.
 Structural activities
 Pre-communicative activities
 Quasi-communicative activities
 Functional communication activities
 Communicative activities
 Social interaction activities
 • Aim: to give the learners fluent control over
linguistic forms, so the learners will produce
language which is acceptable • Function: to
prepare the learner for later communication.
• The teacher may begin the teaching with a
communicative activity • Pre-communicative
activities: drills, question-and-answer
practice
 • Aims: (a) to provide ‘whole-task practice’, (b)
to improve motivation,
 (c) to allow natural learning, and
 (d) to create a context which supports learning •
Functional communication activities: comparing
sets of pictures and noting similarities and
differences, following directions, discovering
missing features in a map or picture
 • Social interaction activities: conversation and
discussion sessions, dialogues and role plays,
simulations, debates
 • Learners are expected to take on a greater
degree of responsibilty for their own learning.
 Students interact with each other
 • Teachers play roles as facilitator and
monitor
 ‘Classroom activities should parallel the ‘real
world’ as closely as possible. Since language
is a tool of communication, methods, and
materials should concentrate on the message
and not the medium. The purposes of reading
should be the same in class as they are in real
life’.
 Role play is an important communicative
activity. It allows your students to practice the
target language in a safe environment where
mistakes are no big deal.
 2. The Talk Show Interview
 Here, students will experience what it’s like
being the host of a talk show or being the
guest answering questions in front of a live
studio audience.
 3. Objectified
 Have students draw from rolled sheets of
paper containing names of different objects.
Their job, using the target language, is to
describe and give plenty of hints so that the
class can discover what the object is.
 4. What I YouTubed Last Weekend
 Let your students tell about the most
awesome thing they’ve seen on YouTube over
the weekend. The only catch is that they
should do this in the target language.
 5. News Reporting
 Let the students choose a topic of their
liking. They could choose to report on sports,
politics, business, showbiz, lifestyle—
anything they might see reported on TV. But
unlike their favorite CNN anchors, they won’t
be reading from a script. They’ll have to
commit their piece to memory to really tell a
story! A 30-second clip would be more than
enough.