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Interactive Activities

The document discusses different types of speaking activities according to William Littlewood. Littlewood categorizes activities as either pre-communicative or communicative. Pre-communicative activities focus on language forms and prepare learners for communication. Communicative activities require learners to use language to communicate meanings. Within communicative activities, Littlewood distinguishes between functional communication activities, which focus on exchanging information, and social interaction activities, which add a social dimension through role plays and simulations.

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Karolina Böhmová
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145 views

Interactive Activities

The document discusses different types of speaking activities according to William Littlewood. Littlewood categorizes activities as either pre-communicative or communicative. Pre-communicative activities focus on language forms and prepare learners for communication. Communicative activities require learners to use language to communicate meanings. Within communicative activities, Littlewood distinguishes between functional communication activities, which focus on exchanging information, and social interaction activities, which add a social dimension through role plays and simulations.

Uploaded by

Karolina Böhmová
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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4.

SPEAKING ACTIVITIES
Speaking is a complex skill which on the basis of The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (hereinafter referred to as CEFR) comprises of five qualitative aspects of spoken language use. The first aspect is the range which refers to the vocabulary according to the language level. Further on, accuracy and fluency plays also a significant part. These two aspects are introduced bellow. The competence of communicating is understood as the fourth aspect termed an interaction. And the last but not least, coherence, involves creating a coherent and cohesive discourse, and appropriate use of a wide range of connectors and other cohesive devices (CEFR 2011, 28-29 [online])1 Consequently, its practice is indisputable. Oral interaction activities have various characteristic features and many scholars, such as Littlewood, Ur, or Harmer, who work in the field of language teaching, have proposed their views and applications that might be used in nowadays language lessons. Due to the limited extent of this thesis only the William Littlewoods division of oral interaction activities is taken into consideration for the purpose of this thesis.

4.1. Categorization of oral interaction activities according to William Littlewood


In communicative language learning, students should be provided with a great deal of opportunities to use the language through communicative activities, which should be accomplished in a communicative way. Littlewood (1981) defines four major kinds of activities, which are diagrammatically represented as follows:

(Littlewood 1981, 86)

See Appendix 4 for detailed information according to The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
1

Even though there are various classifications of activities which are typically found in communicative language classrooms, Littlewood presents the most important methodological distinction between pre-communicative and communicative learning activities. The former are preparatory activities, intended to prime learners for the second type of task, in which they are required to communicate. (Bygate 1987, 61) The aim of pre-communicative activities is to prepare learners to be able to use appropriate language with no anxiety about communicating effectively. Pre-communicative activities are activities which deal with controlled practice of formal aspects of conversation, and include drills, dialogues, and other exercises where little learner input is required. (Richards 1990, 82) In other words, pre-communicative activities are providing learners with the essential linguistic forms and the requisite bonds between forms and meanings. (Littlewood 1981, 16) Those activities are supposed to prepare learners for later communicative activity and their focus should be more on language forms to be learnt than on meanings to be communicated. (Littlewood 1981, 16) The category of precommunicative activities is also sub-divided. The first variant is composed of structural exercises, which are focusing mostly on the grammatical system of language. The aim of the structural activities is to strengthen the use of the language fluently rather than accurately. The second type is called quasi-communicative and comprises of conversational interchanges, which might be in the form of drills or dialogues. Those activities should help with the use of language to transmit some real information of facts, social context and to discern how to use interrogatives. (Bygate 1987, 62) Some examples of the quasi-communicative activities are mentioned below: 1. A: Shall we go to the concert? B: Well, I would rather stay at home. A: What would you like to do then? B. I would like to watch a movie. 2. C: Excuse me, where is the hospital near here? D: It is near to the post office. C: Excuse me, where is the theatre? D: It is opposite the bank.

According to Bygate (1987), communicative activities insist on learners to use their precommunicative knowledge and integrate it into the full activity of communicating meanings. (p.61) Littlewood sub-divides communicative activities into two alternatives; functional communication activities and social interaction activities. The purpose of the first type, functional communication activities, is that learners should use the language they know in order to get meanings across as effectively as possible. (Littlewood 1981, 20) Littlewood divides the functional communication activities into four types. Sharing information with restricted cooperation is the first type of functional activity which demonstrates the most understandable patterns of interaction. It comprises of activities such as identifying pictures, detecting differences, discovering sequences, locations, or missing information, etc. The second type, sharing information with unrestricted cooperation, reduces the conventions that restrict the cooperation among learners. Sharing and processing information is the third variant that consists of activities such as reconstructing story-sequences or pooling information to solve a problem. Processing information is the last type of functional communication activity and it dispenses completely with the need to share information. (Littlewood 1981, 22-38) The second type of communicative activities, social interaction activities, adds a further dimension to the functional activities and involves role-plays, simulation and social context. Those activities are in close proximity to the communication situations outside the classroom, where language is not only a functional instrument, but also a form of social behaviour. (Littlewood 1981, 43)

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