s translation and that was usually translation of «great literature» rather than letters to the bank manager. The methodology for teaching modern, «living» languages ??was identical to the methodology for dead, classical languages ??like Latin and Ancient Greek. Today, we see our primary aim as teaching the practical use of English for communication with native speakers and others.English as a system of communicationcontains many «systems», one of which is the system of grammar. Mastery of grammar is still important but only as a means to successful communication.long have you been here? How long are you here for? Are less concerned with the grammatical difference between these two questions than with their difference in meaning. We are less concerned with grammatical errors of form than with errors of meaning because these will lead to a breakdown in communication.are communicative activities? Its purest form, a communicative activity is an activity in which there is: a desire to communicate; a communicative purpose; a focus on language content not language forms; a variety of language used; no teacher intervention; no control or simplification of the material. Let's examine each characteristic in turn.
. A desire to communicate.a communicative activity there must be a reason to communicate. When someone asks a question, the person must wish to get some information or some other form of result. There must be either an «information gap» or an «opinion gap» or some other reason to communicate.
. A communicative purpose.we ask students to describe their bedroom furniture to their partners, we are creating an artificial «communicative purpose» and making the activity more artificial by asking them to do it in English.also create artificial «information gaps» by giving different information to pairs of students so that they can have a reason to exchange information.
. A focus on language content not language forms.real life, we do not ask about our friend «s family in order to practice» have got 'forms. We ask the question because we are interested in the information. That is to say, we are interested in the language content and not in the language forms.
. A variety of language is used.normal communication, we do not repeatedly use the same language forms. In fact, we usually try to avoid repetition. In many classroom activities we often try to create situations in which students will repeatedly use a limited number of language patterns. This is also artificial.
. No teacher intervention.you are buying a ticket for The Lion King at the theatre, your teacher is not usually beside you to «help» or «correct» your English. Teacher intervention in classroom communicative activities adds to the artificiality.
. No control or simplification of the material.the classroom, we often use graded or simplified materials as prompts for communicative activities. These will not be available in the real world.can we make classroom «communicative activities» less artificial? we have seen, there is no real possibility of real communication in English in a monolingual classroom. Learners must «pretend» that they need to communicate in English. However, we can reduce the artificiality by looking at the features mentioned above. We can easily reduce teacher intervention, we c...
