Since the advent of CLT, teachers and materials writers have sought to find ways
of developing classroom activities that reflect the principles of a communicative methodology. This quest has continued to the present, as we shall see later in the booklet. The principles on which the first generation of CLT materials are based remain relevant to language teaching today, so in this chapter we will briefly review the main activity types that were one of the outcomes of CLT.

Accuracy Versus Fluency Activities
One of the goals of CLT is to develop fluency in language use. Fluency is natu- ral language use occurring when a speaker engages in meaningful interaction and maintains comprehensible and ongoing communication despite limitations
in his or her communicative competence. Fluency is developed by creating classroom activities in which students must negotiate meaning, use communica- tion strategies, correct misunderstandings, and work to avoid communication breakdowns.
Fluency practice can be contrasted with accuracy practice, which focuses on creating correct examples of language use. Differences between activities that focus on fluency and those that focus on accuracy can be sum- marized as follows:

Activities focusing on fluency
Reflect natural use of language
Focus on achieving communication
Require meaningful use of language
Require the use of communication strategies
Produce language that may not be predictable
Seek to link language use to context

Activities focusing on accuracy
Reflect classroom use of language
Focus on the formation of correct examples of language
Practice language out of context
Practice small samples of language
Do not require meaningful communication
Control choice of language

Task 8
Can you give examples of fluency and accuracy activities that you use in your teaching?

The following are examples of fluency activities and accuracy activities. Both make use of group work, reminding us that group work is not necessarily
a fluency task (see Brumfit 1984).

Fluency Tasks
A group of students of mixed language ability carry out a role play in which they have to adopt specified roles and personalities provided
for them on cue cards. These roles involve the drivers, witnesses, and the police at a collision between two cars. The language is entirely improvised by the students, though they are heavily constrained by
the specified situation and characters.
The teacher and a student act out a dialog in which a customer returns a faulty object she has purchased to a department store. The clerk asks what the problem is and promises to get a refund for the customer or to replace the item. In groups, students now try to recreate the dialog using language items of their choice. They are asked to recreate what happened preserving the meaning but not necessarily the exact language. They later act out their dialogs in
front of the class.

Accuracy Tasks
Students are practicing dialogs. The dialogs contain examples of falling intonation in Wh-questions. The class is organized in groups of three, two students practicing the dialog, and the third playing
the role of monitor. The monitor checks that the others are using the correct intonation pattern and corrects them where necessary.
The students rotate their roles between those reading the dialog and those monitoring. The teacher moves around listening to the groups and correcting their language where necessary.
Students in groups of three or four complete an exercise on a grammatical item, such as choosing between the past tense and the present perfect, an item which the teacher has previously presented and practiced as a whole class activity. Together students decide which grammatical form is correct and they complete the exercise. Groups take turns reading out their answers.

Teachers were recommended to use a balance of fluency activities and accuracy and to use accuracy activities to support fluency activities. Accuracy work could either come before or after fluency work. For example, based on

students’ performance on a fluency task, the teacher could assign accuracy work
to deal with grammatical or pronunciation problems the teacher observed while students were carrying out the task. An issue that arises with fluency work, how- ever, is whether it develops fluency at the expense of accuracy. In doing fluency tasks, the focus is on getting meanings across using any available communicative resources. This often involves a heavy dependence on vocabulary and com- munication strategies, and there is little motivation to use accurate grammar or pronunciation. Fluency work thus requires extra attention on the part of the teacher in terms of preparing students for a fluency task, or follow-up activities that provide feedback on language use.
While dialogs, grammar, and pronunciation drills did not usually dis- appear from textbooks and classroom materials at this time, they now appeared
as part of a sequence of activities that moved back and forth between accuracy activities and fluency activities.
And the dynamics of classrooms also changed. Instead of a predomi- nance of teacher-fronted teaching, teachers were encouraged to make greater use of small-group work. Pair and group activities gave learners greater oppor- tunities to use the language and to develop fluency.

Mechanical, Meaningful, and Communicative Practice
Another useful distinction that some advocates of CLT proposed was the dis- tinction between three different kinds of practice – mechanical, meaningful, and communicative.

Mechanical practicerefers to a controlled practice activity which students can successfully carry out without necessarily understanding the language they are using. Examples of this kind of activity would be repetition drills and substitu- tion drills designed to practice use of particular grammatical or other items.

Meaningful practice refers to an activity where language control is still provided but where students are required to make meaningful choices when carrying out practice. For example, in order to practice the use of prepositions to describe locations of places, students might be given a street map with various buildings identified in different locations. They are also given a list of prepositions such
as across from, on the corner of, near, on, next to. They then have to answer ques- tions such as “Where is the book shop? Where is the café?” etc. The practice
is now meaningful because they have to respond according to the location of places on the map.

Communicative practice refers to activities where practice in using language within a real communicative context is the focus, where real information is exchanged, and where the language used is not totally predictable. For example, students might have to draw a map of their neighborhood and answer questions about the location of different places, such as the nearest bus stop, the nearest café, etc.

Exercise sequences in many CLT course books take students from mechanical, to meaningful, to communicative practice. The following exercise, for example, is found in Passages 2 (Richards and Sandy 1998).

If students read and practice aloud the sentences in the grammar box, this constitutes mechanical practice. Exercises A and B can be regarded as meaningful practice since students now complete the sentences with their own information. Exercise C is an example of communicative practice since it is an open-ended discussion activity.


Task 9
Examine the activities in one unit of a course book. Can you find examples of activities that provide mechanical, meaningful, and communicative practice? What type of activities predominate?

The distinction between mechanical, meaningful, and communicative activities is similar to that given by Littlewood (1981), who groups activities into two kinds:
Pre-communicative activities  Communicative activities
Structural activities Functional communication activities
Quasi-communicative activities Social interactional activities
Functional communication activities require students to use their language resources to overcome an information gap or solve a problem (see below). Social interactional activities require the learner to pay attention to the context and the roles of the people involved, and to attend to such things as formal versus informal language.

Information-Gap Activities
An important aspect of communication in CLT is the notion of information gap. This refers to the fact that in real communication, people normally com- municate in order to get information they do not possess. This is known as an information gap. More authentic communication is likely to occur in the class- room if students go beyond practice of language forms for their own sake and use their linguistic and communicative resources in order to obtain information.
In so doing, they will draw available vocabulary, grammar, and communication strategies to complete a task. The following exercises make use of the informa- tion-gap principle:

Students are divided into A-B pairs. The teacher has copied two sets of pictures. One set (for A students) contains a picture of a group of people. The other set (for B students) contains a similar picture but it contains a number of slight differences from the A-picture. Students
must sit back to back and ask questions to try to find out how many differences there are between the two pictures.
Students practice a role play in pairs. One student is given the information she/he needs to play the part of a clerk in the railway station information booth and has information on train departures, prices, etc. The other needs to obtain information on departure times, prices, etc. They role-play the interaction without looking at each other’s cue cards.

Jigsaw activities
These are also based on the information-gap principle. Typically, the class is divided into groups and each group has part of the information needed to com- plete an activity. The class must fit the pieces together to complete the whole.
In so doing, they must use their language resources to communicate meaning- fully and so take part in meaningful communication practice. The following are examples of jigsaw activities:

The teacher plays a recording in which three people with different points of view discuss their opinions on a topic of interest. The teacher prepares three different listening tasks, one focusing on each of the three speaker’s points of view. Students are divided into three groups and each group listens and takes notes on one of the three speaker’s opinions. Students are then rearranged into groups containing a student from groups A, B, and C. They now role-play the discussion using the information they obtained.

The teacher takes a narrative and divides it into twenty sections (or as many sections as there are students in the class). Each student gets one section of the story. Students must then move around the class, and by listening to each section read aloud, decide where in the story their section belongs. Eventually the students have to put the entire story together in the correct sequence.

Other Activity Types in CLT
Many other activity types have been used in CLT, including the following:

Task-completion activities: puzzles, games, map-reading, and other kinds of classroom tasks in which the focus is on using one’s language resources to complete a task.
Information-gathering activities: student-conducted surveys, interviews, and searches in which students are required to use their linguistic resources to col- lect information.
Opinion-sharing activities: activities in which students compare values, opin- ions, or beliefs, such as a ranking task in which students list six qualities in order
of importance that they might consider in choosing a date or spouse.
Information-transfer activities: These require learners to take information that is presented in one form, and represent it in a different form. For example, they may read instructions on how to get from A to B, and then draw a map showing the sequence, or they may read information about a subject and then represent it as a graph.
Reasoning-gap activities: These involve deriving some new information from given information through the process of inference, practical reasoning, etc. F example, working out a teacher’s timetable on the basis of given class timetables.
Role plays: activities in which students are assigned roles and improvise a scene or exchange based on given information or clues.

Emphasis on Pair and Group Work
Most of the activities discussed above reflect an important aspect of classroom tasks in CLT, namely that they are designed to be carried out in pairs or small groups. Through completing activities in this way, it is argued, learners will obtain several benefits:

They can learn from hearing the language used by other members of the group.
They will produce a greater amount of language than they would use in teacher-fronted activities.
Their motivational level is likely to increase.
They will have the chance to develop fluency.
Teaching and classroom materials today consequently make use of a wide variety of small-group activities.

Task 10
What are some advantages and limitations of pair and group work in the language classroom?

The Push for Authenticity
Since the language classroom is intended as a preparation for survival in the real world and since real communication is a defining characteristic of CLT, an issue which soon emerged was the relationship between classroom activities and real life. Some argued that classroom activities should as far as possible mirror the real world and use real world or “authentic” sources as the basis for classroom learning. Clarke and Silberstein (1977, 51) thus argued:
Classroom activities should parallel the “real world” as closely as possible. Since language is a tool of communication, methods and materials should concentrate on the message and not the medium. The purposes of reading should be the same in class as they are in real life.
Arguments in favor of the use of authentic materials include:

They provide cultural information about the target language.
They provide exposure to real language.
They relate more closely to learners’ needs.
They support a more creative approach to teaching.

Others (e.g., Widdowson 1987) argued that it is not important if classroom materials themselves are derived from authentic texts and other forms
of input, as long as the learning processes they facilitated were authentic. Critics of the case for authentic materials point out that:

Created materials can also be motivating for learners.
Created materials may be superior to authentic materials because they are generally built around a graded syllabus.
Authentic materials often contain difficult and irrelevant language.
Using authentic materials is a burden for teachers.

However, since the advent of CLT, textbooks and other teaching materials have taken on a much more “authentic” look; reading passages are designed to look like magazine articles (if they are not in fact adapted from magazine articles) and textbooks are designed to a similar standard of produc- tion as real world sources such as popular magazines.

Task 11
How useful do you think authentic materials are in the classroom? What difficulties arise in using authentic materials?