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Date Posted: 18:03:32 07/22/03 Tue
Author: Carlos Gagliardi
Subject: task 13

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.
It MUST be original. Do not copy any activity from textbooks.
You get a set of words cut out in squares, which has to be adjectives and nouns, depending on the number of students, and each student get around 10 square words. They sit in circles and the first student read the first word, and the student around him has to add the word he has to the one the student just read. In addition, it goes around the class with the student having to keep adding words to the sentence without it loosing any meaning. For example, one student has the first word “house”, and the second one has to find one word that he has that have to make any sense with the house, for example, “black” and then he would say “the house is black”; the third student has the word “winter”, so he would form a sentence like “the house gets black in winter” or anything like that that would make sense.

This game can be used for basic to advanced students, all the teacher has to do is to choose the words and how many each student would get.

Another variation of this game is to change the words with pictures. Each student gets several pictures of people and/or places, and the first student starts describing his picture and the second one adds up his and the third adds his and so on, making sure that the sentences make sense. For example, the first student has a picture of an elephant, and the second one has the picture of a man and he would say like, “the elephant was raised by the man… “

Yet another variation with the pictures is that it can be used for yes/no question. A student stands in front of the class and the class goes asking yes/no questions, for example, is it a man? Is he young? Is he an actor? Etc… or if it is a place, is it a house? Is it a mountain? Is it in Brazil? Etc…

Although I have read and think great all the communicative activities from William Littlewood, this one I described fits in the sharing information with restricted cooperation category.

I tested them with my students it they have great fun with them.

Another communicative approach I used to use with my students at Fisk was the cooking class. Every month we used to select an English speaking country regional recipe, gather in the kitchen and divide into groups and each group be responsible for some part of the recipe, for example, some group would be responsible for buying the products, some for the preparation, mixing, oven temperature, silverware, seasonings, etc, finishing giving their opinion about the taste and flavor of the dish.

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