VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2, 3, 4 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 13:11:30 08/01/03 Fri
Author: José Miguel Teixeira de Carvalho
Subject: Task # 13

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.


Like many of my classmates I have never had the experience of teaching an English class before. However, today's task requires me to create, completely out of the blue, a good communication activity. All I can say to finish this brief note is that, whether I succeed or fail, I did my best.

HELPING PEOPLE AT THE AIRPORT
Target: Intermediate level students.
Age: 15 to 18 years old.
Class: 20 students minimum, 30 students maximum, grouped in pairs.
Duration: 15 minutes, more or less.

At page 29 of his text, Littlewood painstakingly explains that a communicative activity is, "in a technical sense, well short of the flexible, spontaneous kind of communicative interaction that is the ultimate objective". So, in order to make the interaction more spontaneous I suggest, as an important part of the activity I am presenting, that each pair of student ask one friend to take part in the exercise. Besides, the friend ought to be completely ignorant on English language grounds. This is a must for it to work out.
It is quite simple: having grouped up the class in pairs, the students will perform a role-play. The scenario is an airport arriving room. One student will pretend to have arrived at the airport, coming from the US of A, expecting to meet an old friend at a certain previously arranged time and place. Instead of the old friend, a third person – that could be either a mutual friend of the students or a friend of only one of them – is at the airport, substituting the old friend that couldn't make it to the airport. The problem is that this helper does not know how to speak a word of English (this should be true), neither can the recent arrived traveller speak, or understand, Portuguese (this, of course, is not possible).
All the helper knows is the traveller's last name written in a piece of cardboard (say, Mr. Smith) and some previous given information, such as the bus timetable, how much for a taxi fair downtown and the reason why Mr. Smith's old friend is not there. Since Mr. Smith cannot understand Portuguese, a translator is necessary, and that is where the other student comes in. The student who would play the translator would have the most important role, because messages, both in Portuguese and in English, will have to be conveyed properly.

This is a type of activity based on sharing and processing information. And to be more specifically, it is a type of pooling information to solve a problem.

Of course that the ideal situation would be that in which we had a person who couldn't speak English and another who couldn't speak Portuguese. Then, the translator would be on his own, pooling information to solve the problems of the parts involved. It would be a kind of "jigsaw listening", as Littlewood calls it.

Source: Littlewood, W. Communicative language teaching.Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1981. p. 16 to 42

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.