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Date Posted: 15:26:18 08/01/03 Fri
Author: SIMONE COUTO
Subject: TASK 13

THIRTEENTH CLASS
July 28th to August 1st

Material Development

According to Littlewood (1981:39), functional communication activities place learners in a situation where they need to use language for a well defined communicative purpose.
Create a good communication activity and describe it to your classmates. Say which type it is, according to Littlewood.
Littlewood, W. Communicative language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1981. p. 16 to 42

I feel that the higher the level of the class the lesser opportunities the students get to take part in social interaction activities since teachers’ main aim is usually the capacitation of their students for exams such as TOEFL, C.A.E. and the like. Therefore, I believe there is a great gap in textbooks and lessons that ought to be filled so learners can practice effective oral communication according to different social contexts. I came up with this activity a few months ago for a class of advanced students at Cultura Inglesa, where most of them were teenagers or in their early twenties. In the previous lesson I had given them a song, which they had fully understood, except for the slangs. That is when I noticed that though they do know many slangs from films, sitcoms and even songs, these were all American ones. So I elaborated a task to develop their British colloquial vocabulary farther, which is very relevant in terms of one being socially accepted in certain situations, whether speaking or simply comprehending someone else speaking.


In the first part of the activity, the students had to try to apprehend the meaning of slangs from their contexts in order to build a list with as many as possible, including any they already knew. The material I took for them was from many varied sources: two scenes of the film “Trainspotting”, lyrics from a pop song, a recorded piece of the tv series “As If” and an article from an English teenage magazine.
In the second part, they had to improvise a dialogue in pairs using as many slangs as possible, making believe they were in a specific place they would go to at night – like a party, a club or a bar.
In the third part, so as to fix the new learnt language, each pair had to write a dialogue with the same topics they had previously talked about and act it out for the class. And, there was an award for the pair who used most slangs (in a fuctionally accepted way, of course) and another award for the pair who managed to perform their dialogue in the most convincing manner possible.

The activity took up the whole class (1hour 15minutes), but it was one of the best lessons I gave in the semester. The students were all very motivated and involved, managing not only to have a very fun time but also learning a lot. Until the end of the semestre, every class they continued using the new vocabulary, whether to give opinions, for greeting, thanking and the like - no rude ones were accepted though.

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