Communicative Exercises

What is language for?

Language is one of the many forms of communication we can use, one of the ways in which we inform people about what is going on inside us , when we say 'I am hungry' or ' my heart is broken ' we are expressing things that sometimes we can't see but only hear about.

However, language is about concepts and ideas - it's not about the use of the subjunctive. Learning a foreign language should be fun. We want to learn a new language because we want to communicate, to interchange knowledge and all kinds of ideas. This is why one of the best approches to language learning is the coomunicative approach.

Here's an example called "Eavesdropping". It is a very popular communicative exercise and it is aimed at advanced students.

Listen to a conversation somewhere in a public place and be prepared to answer, in the target language, some general questions about what was said.

1. Who was talking?

2. About how old were they?

3. Where were they?

4. What were they talking about?

5. What did they say?

6. Did they become aware that you were listening to them?

The exercise puts students in a real-world listening situation where they must report information overheard. Most likely they have an opinion of the topic, and a class discussion could follow, in the target language, about their experiences and viewpoints.

Here's another exercise: The teacher shows the students a video such as from 0:50 to 2:10, then the classroom is divided into two or three groups, the teacher will act as a moderator and will give ideas to start discussing the video such as: what issues or problems are presented in the video? when are they going to be solved? if you were president what would you do to solve them?

Finally, games and activities are also a nice way to improve communicative skills. Here's a forum where you can find many activities that can be used inside the clasroom English games and activities

What do you think about the communicative approach? Have you used it?