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Date Posted: 12:37:46 07/25/03 Fri
Author: Mylene Fonseca
Subject: task 12

Communicative Approach On line Class
Learner: Mylene Fonseca Garcia
Task Twelve



Littlewood points out in his book Communicative Language Teaching –An introduction, the difference between pre-communicative activities and communicative activities. According to him, in pre-communicative activities, “the learner’s focus [is] more on language forms to be learnt”, whereas in the latter, the learner focuses on “meanings to be communicated”. Hence, the goal is to achieve communicative effectiveness.
Moreover, Littlewood enumerates some contributions to learning language provided by communicative activities: “they provide ‘whole-task practice’, improve motivation, allow natural learning, and create a context which supports learning”. In other words, they allow a communicative purpose to take place by stimulating social interaction in class.
Bearing this in mind, I will introduce my chosen activity. It is in an English language book called Life Styles, published by Longman for ESL students. It’s an authentic add about a cd’s sale in a music shop with a map which lies bellow it. It fits for beginners and deals with the use of basic prepositions, such as on, between, of, next to, etc. The idea is that the learner should complete some add’s missing parts accordingly. The directions are described in the map. I made sure both add and map are objective and clear.
In my activity, a pair or a small group of learners should have this add and the map should be in another’s pair/group hands. So, I can name my activity as sharing information with restricted cooperation, by following Littlewood classification. In fact, one group detains the information (the map) but not the directions (the add). So, for the activity to work, they must cooperate with each other. That is, the first group (add holders) should make objective questions to discover the right directions to find where the cd store is located, and the second group (map holders) would answer those questions.
Summing up, this activity stimulates social integration among students, prevents the teacher of intervening too much, reflects a real life situation and, most important, establishes a communicative purpose in motion. These are all requisites of a communicative activity.

Littlewood, W. Communicative Language Teaching.Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1981.

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