Collins Teaching Techniques for Communicative English

Collins Teaching Techniques for Communicative English Jane Revell A practical teacher guide book for helping students to improve their communication skills in EnglishHow can teachers bridge the gap between the language of the classroom and the world outside?The lively activities in this book give learners a chance to experiment creatively with newly-acquired language so they can communicate in a meaningful way in real-life situations. Contents Acknowledgements About the Author (#u9eedf12a-2423-59af-8d47-b7081ecfc95a) Preface to the Second Edition (2011) (#u5a3e6d21-b3b2-5df5-85cd-37f4f00e8664) Preface to the First Edition (1979) (#ud7df9d8a-9553-56ea-ac83-3181b50a98d1) 1 Communication (#u87a66c56-3f99-5669-a025-ce6d7948744a) 1.1 Surprises 1.2 Communication (#ulink_8a8c8180-dabe-5384-b507-577fb49e9599) 1.3 Communicative competence (#ulink_5a19c69e-03b9-5b49-9829-628431a79927) 1.4 Teaching communicative competence (#ulink_43845244-4ccd-53d1-9113-c579fa5c2e71) 1.5 Accuracy versus fluency (#ulink_a03949f5-728d-5b37-b98b-025d8140c5db) 2 Limbering up (#u6c0ceb3a-ac49-585a-b1d4-5b847ad8ffda) 2.1 Getting in the mood 2.2 Possible problems (#ulink_7ee5dfa1-81eb-5fb3-ac04-b7a88b8c3e97) 2.3 Dealing with mistakes (#ulink_a27b516a-9e8c-5913-9a26-0c83bb166397) 2.4 ‘Getting to know you’ games (#litres_trial_promo) 1 Adding on names 2 Throw and name (#litres_trial_promo) 3 Back to back (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Find out and report back (#litres_trial_promo) 5 Half and half (#litres_trial_promo) 6 Find your identical twin (#litres_trial_promo) 7 Just the job (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Untie the knot (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Circle of trust (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Three make a tree! (#litres_trial_promo) 2.5 Activities involving gesture and mime (#litres_trial_promo) 1 Interpreting gestures (#litres_trial_promo) 2 Mime a message (#litres_trial_promo) 3 What’s my job? (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Pass the parcel (#litres_trial_promo) 5 Guess what the guest means! (#litres_trial_promo) 6 Mime a story (#litres_trial_promo) 7 Charades (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Auditions (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Build up a character (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Listen and act it out (#litres_trial_promo) 2.6 Activities involving intonation and expression (#litres_trial_promo) 1 React to the news 2 React and make a gesture (#litres_trial_promo) 3 Mood cards (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Three or four line dialogues (#litres_trial_promo) 2.7 What would you say? (#litres_trial_promo) 1 Practising set responses (#litres_trial_promo) 2 Practising specific structures (#litres_trial_promo) 3 Practising specific functions (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Practising making an appropriate response (#litres_trial_promo) 3 From script to spontaneity (#litres_trial_promo) 3.1 Scripted and partially scripted dialogues (#litres_trial_promo) 1 Using a sketch Anything to declare? (#litres_trial_promo) 2 Using a text in reported speech (#litres_trial_promo) 3 Half-dialogues (#litres_trial_promo) 3.2 Questionnaires (#litres_trial_promo) 1 Simple fact-finding questionnaires (#litres_trial_promo) 2 Multiple-choice questionnaires (#litres_trial_promo) 3 Checklists (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Using role-cards with questionnaires (#litres_trial_promo) 3.3 Cue cards (#litres_trial_promo) 1 Listen and choose (#litres_trial_promo) 2 Choose an attitude (#litres_trial_promo) 3 Picture cue cards (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Functional cue cards (#litres_trial_promo) Conversation 1 Conversation 2 (#litres_trial_promo) Conversation 3 (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Playing a part (#litres_trial_promo) 4.1 Newspaper articles (#litres_trial_promo) Article 1 Article 2 (#litres_trial_promo) 4.2 Cartoons (#litres_trial_promo) Cartoon 1 Cartoon 2 (#litres_trial_promo) Cartoon 3 (#litres_trial_promo) 4.3 Miscellaneous Materials (#litres_trial_promo) Maps Activity 1: Planning a trip (#litres_trial_promo) Activity 2: Getting around by tube (#litres_trial_promo) Activity 3: Buying a tube ticket (#litres_trial_promo) Menus (#litres_trial_promo) Building up a role-play House Plans (#litres_trial_promo) 4.4 Role cards (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 1: The New Suit (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 2: Diamonds in the Briefcase (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 3: Fully booked! (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 4: Where to go? (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 5: Renting a room (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 6: Making a sale (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 7: Making a sale (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 8: Pop Festivals (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 9: Anniversary dinner (#litres_trial_promo) Role-play 10: A dream house? (#litres_trial_promo) Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Appendices (#litres_trial_promo) A.1 Original Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) A.2 Original Practical Material (#litres_trial_promo) A.3 Ready-made simulations (#litres_trial_promo) A.4 Useful addresses (#litres_trial_promo) A.5 Useful books and sources for ideas (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) … for the First Edition (1979) I should like to acknowledge my special indebtedness to Hugh L’Estrange who read this book and made lots of useful suggestions (and who also helped out with the typing when one finger proved too slow!). I should also like to thank Frances Newman and John Johnson of Kingsway-Princeton College of Further Education, London for their excellent ideas (see particularlypage 87 (#litres_trial_promo) and page 80 (#litres_trial_promo)) and also Dr David Thomas of the University of Bristol, Department of Drama. … for the Second and Third Editions (2011, 2013) Many thanks to Bob Janes for his tremendous support and encouragement, and for all his hard work in putting the book together and giving it a more modern and attractive look. Also to Andy Cowle for his enthusiasm and committment to making this series available to teachers again years later, and to HarperCollins for taking it under their wing. About the Author (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) Jane Revell is an award-winning ELT author who has worked globally in ELT as an educator, manager and trainer since the early 70s. She is widely known in many countries and is greatly respected for her continued contributions and inspiring workshops. Jane is also a Master Practitioner and Certified Trainer of NLP, and a Pilates instructor. www.janerevell.com (http://www.janerevell.com) Preface to the Second Edition (2011) (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) Teaching Techniques for Communicative English was the very first book I ever wrote and it’s now just over thirty years old. (Unlike me.) We decided to publish a new edition because the ideas in the book are still valid today and because it contains a lot of useful advice for teachers and a fair amount of food for thought. When it was first published in 1979 – as the first in a new series of teachers’ books for Macmillan – it was quite radical. The 1970s was an era of great change in English Language Teaching, of attempts to put into practice many new theories about language being proposed by linguists at that time. Today we are very familiar with concepts such as functions, notions, social context, appropriateness and so on but in those days they were fairly new ways of thinking about language. But while the book is no longer ground-breaking, many of the issues it talks about still remain. Creating classroom activities which really get students communicating with one another in a natural and meaningful way is still very challenging. We still haven’t quite cracked it! The classroom is somewhat unnatural by its very nature so perhaps we never will. This book doesn’t pretend to have the answer either but it does attempt to offer some helpful techniques. Reading through the book for the first time in many years I was struck at how fresh it seems. Fresh and, at the same time, a little bit quaint. I have tried not to meddle too much with either its freshness or its quaintness. I have made a few cuts and one or two small changes, but basically I have left it intact: I have left the original newspaper articles and made minimal changes to dialogues, role cards and so on. I have updated things where necessary – zoo prices, for example, have gone up from ?1.60 in 1979 to ?16.80 in 2009 – and I have replaced the photographs, which looked dated, even though teachers will of course be able to download their own visual material from the Internet these days. The use of the pronoun ‘he’ (practically throughout) irritated me a lot so I have dealt with that. I have also made changes to the tense used in some instances, as what was ‘recent’ then, no longer is. Where the text was too categorical or bossy, I have toned it down and made it more tentative. And I have added a few things too. Some websites have been added to the ‘Useful Addresses’ section at the end; the original ‘Bibliography’ and ‘Practical Material’ sections have both been left – for historical interest – and there is a new ‘Useful Books / Sources of Ideas’ section … though several of the original books are still included here. Enjoy! Jane Revell, Preface to the First Edition (1979) (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) I am a teacher of English as a foreign language and at the moment I am learning German as a foreign language in what I would say is a very ‘non-communicative’ way. For three whole hours every morning we listen to the teacher explain rule after rule before we move on to apply these rules in exercise after exercise in the book. In the street after the lesson, I need to know where the 53 bus stops. There is a lady coming. By the time I have managed to formulate my question in German, the lady has gone past. I ask the next passer-by, and expect short and easy-to-follow directions. Instead he says in German, ‘Oh you’ve just missed one. Actually I’m going towards the Haus der Kunst, so I could give you a lift if you like. My car’s right over there.’ ‘Wie bitte?!’ (Pardon?). I am unable to communicate successfully in German, even on a very simple level. Why? For the reasons let’s go back to the classroom. In my German class I normally get to say something about once every hour, when I read out a sentence from an exercise or text. I always talk to the teacher and never to any of the other students, and I never decide what to say, as it’s written in the book for me. No wonder when I come out to face the real world I am thrown! It’s true that this is a very extreme example, and luckily, because I am living in Germany and surrounded by German, my German lessons are unlikely to be a permanent obstacle to successful communication in the language. For foreign learners of English outside an English-speaking environment, however, the problem could be a very serious one. In coping with a foreign language, confidence plays a very large part. Students need to feel that they will be able to apply what they have learnt in the classroom to real life, and be able to tackle many different situations in a foreign language in a foreign country. It is up to the teacher to give the students this confidence, by providing plenty of opportunities for them to practise what they have learnt in as realistic a way as possible inside the classroom. Very often teachers are tied to a specific book and are aiming to get their students through an exam which tests specific items in that book. Even in this situation, which is far from ideal, there is room for communicative activities, activities in which the students can transfer their learning to real situations. Suppose the teacher is working with Alexander’s First Things First at Lesson 77, for example. Rather than just practise everything in the way suggested in the Teacher’s Book and move quickly on to the next lesson, the teacher might think about an activity where the students can practise the structures they have learnt (‘I want to …’ and, ‘Can’t you wait till … ?’) in a similar situation, but in a way which allows them to think and to use language more creatively. They could work in pairs, for example, one as the receptionist, who has some pages from a diary in which certain days and times are booked up, and one as the person who wants to make the appointment. Between them they must work out a suitable time. The activities described on the following pages are of this type. They can be used on their own or they can be used alongside any standard textbook and slotted in at appropriate moments to provide a transfer stage in the lesson. They are activities (particularly the later ones), designed to give learners a chance to experiment with their new linguistic skills, to be more creative. Activities, in short, to bridge the gap between skill-getting in the classroom and skill-using in real life. Chapter 1Communication (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) 1.1 Surprises (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) Communication is an exchange, between people, of knowledge, of information, of ideas, of opinions, of feelings. It takes place in a multitude of ways, from the writings of the weightiest tome to the merest flicker of an eyelid. For genuine communication to take place, what is being communicated must be something new to the recipient, something that person does not know in advance. Com-munication is full of surprises. It is this element of unexpectedness and unpredictability which makes communication what it is, and for which it is so hard to prepare the student by conventional teaching methods. It is true that there are a few fairly predictable responses: ‘Hello’ will produce one of a limited number of predictable replies, ‘Hello’, ‘Hi’, ‘Good morning’, etc. But these exchanges take place in a very small number of special situations – they are often social formulae, which serve to establish or maintain relations between the speakers rather than convey any earth-shattering information. It is also true that we can often predict the semantic area of a response and even guess at key words which will come up. If, after a visit to the zoo, someone asks, ‘Did you see the reptiles?’, the response is likely to be in the general area of ‘zoo-going’ and animals, and words such as ‘snake’, ‘lizard’ and ‘crocodile’ might well occur. In a lot of cases, however, responses are completely unpredictable. The question ‘Did you see the reptiles?’ could produce any of the following replies: ‘You bet we did. At ?16.80 to go in, we made sure we got our money’s worth!’; ‘That reminds me, did you ring Aunt Nelly?’; ‘Oh, have you heard about John going to Kenya?’ etc. This sort of interaction is very often ignored in language teaching. In the early days of TEFL, the emphasis was on the formation of language habits rather than on the development of communicative skills. Stimulus / response drills and the like encouraged learners to think that any given utterance has a set reply. Although this type of classroom exercise is still valuable practice in formulating communications and ‘getting the tongue round’ stretches of language, it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and the transfer to real life is not automatic: an intermediate stage is called for. The sort of activities described in subsequent chapters of the book (see particularlyChapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)), are designed to help bridge this gap. 1.2 Communication (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) We use language to communicate. We do not just communicate facts to each other, we always convey what we feel about those facts – finding a completely neutral statement is impossible. If I say ‘It’s raining’, listeners will know whether I’m surprised (because the sun was shining only ten minutes ago), or whether I’m upset (because we were going to have a picnic), or whether I’m relieved (because the hockey match will be cancelled) and so on, and the clues they will use to deduce this will not necessarily be verbal ones. Words are used to communicate propositions. Words can also convey attitudes, but more often than not, attitudes are conveyed by intonation, gesture, facial expression and many other non-verbal means. Meaning is conveyed not only through language, but also through bodily contact, physical proximity, orientation, bodily posture, gesture, head-nods, facial expression, eye movement and even appearance. Also important are the non-linguistic aspects of speech itself: the speed at which a person speaks, how loud or how softly they speak, the pitch and the quality of their voice (whether husky, whispered, strident, etc.), all these things contribute to the meaning of the actual words said. La Barre’s work on gesture seems to prove that this is both specific to certain cultures and arbitrary (and therefore needs to be taught), rather than universal and instinctive. We may think that everybody uses a finger to point at something like we do, but the American Indians, for example, point with their lips. When a Masai spits, it is a sign of affection, not of contempt. The Basuto hiss to applaud; the Japanese to show respect to a social superior. While Westerners stand up to show their respect, Fijians and Tongans sit down. Even very widespread gestures like nodding the head to mean ‘yes’ and shaking it to mean ‘no’ are not totally universal: the Anin in Japan, the Semang in Malaya and the Ethiopians all use different gestures to indicate ‘yes’ and ‘no’. There are also wide cultural differences when it comes to bodily contact and physical proximity. While Latin peoples tend to stand very close to the person they’re talking to and often touch each other in the course of a conversation, Northern Europeans often prefer to keep a greater distance between speakers and touch each other less (although this does seem to be changing with more and more cross-cultural communication). To prevent misunderstandings arising, students need to be able to communicate not only propositions, but also the attitude that is appropriate to what they are saying. It is not being advocated that learners become proficient in non-verbal communication at the expense of their linguistic skills, even though it’s quite possible to make yourself understood on certain matters simply by grunting and waving your arms about! Verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication should interrelate in a teaching programme, and some of the activities suggeted later have been designed with this in mind. 1.3 Communicative competence (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) In 1965 the American linguist Noam Chomsky made a distinction very similar to the one that Ferdinand de Saussure had made between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ in 1916. The distinction made by Chomsky was between ‘competence’ – a speaker’s intuitive knowledge of the rules of their native language – and ‘performance’ – what the person actually produces by applying these rules. Chomsky was talking about grammatical rules: native speakers, he said, know intuitively which sentences are grammatical, and which are not, and it is their linguistic competence which tells them this. In 1970, Campbell and Wales proposed that the Chomskyan notion of competence should be extended beyond purely grammatical competence to include a more general communicative ability. Language does not occur in isolation, as Chomsky seemed to suggest; it occurs in a social context and reflects social rather than linguistic purposes. A child acquires a knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate to the context in which they are made. ‘He knows when and when not to speak, what to talk about with whom, when, where, and in what manner’. A child has communicative competence as well as linguistic competence. Theories of communicative competence imply that teachers must do more than just supply learners with a number of language structures to manipulate. There are cases of people being unable to use a language after years of formal teaching! We need to demonstrate how language items are used, and in what situations they are appropriate. We need to show learners that a choice of words is possible, indeed necessary, and will colour the propositional content of what they say. They must teach them, in short, the ‘use’ of language as well as its ‘usage’. 1.4 Teaching communicative competence (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) The crucial question is how to bridge the gap between linguistic competence and communicative competence, how to develop a smooth transition between ‘skill-getting’ and ‘skill-using’. In 1973 Wilga Rivers warned that a schizophrenic situation can develop between these two types of activity: in ‘skill-getting’ the emphasis is on the going, not on the destination, whereas in ‘skill-using’ students are aiming at the goal of communicative competence. The gap is so difficult to bridge because the classroom environment by its very nature makes genuine communi-cation extremely elusive: as we have already said, com-munication stems from necessity, and this element is usually absent in a classroom situation. Students often know in advance what they will say and what everybody else will say too. Everybody (including the teacher) asks questions to which they already know the answer: T (Referring to a picture or a text) Ask what Johnny was doing at 3 o’clock yesterday. S1 What was Johnny doing at 3 o’clock yesterday? S2 He was sitting under a banana tree. Nobody is exchanging any information, and consequently nobody really needs to listen to what is being said. The element of choice talked about in the last section is missing – there is too much control, there are no surprises. Necessity, in the form of doubt, of unpredictability, of an information gap can, however, be created in the classroom by the use of activities where the participants are only in possession of part of the total information. Students then have a certain amount of choice in what to say, they ask questions because they don’t know the answer, and they have a reason for listening to one another. ‘Jigsaw’ listening or reading – an idea pioneered by Geddes and Sturtridge in the 1970s – is one way of providing an information gap. Each student, or group of students, has one section of the whole tape or text, or certain bits of information that the others don’t have, and they must swap ideas and information in order to discover the whole. Activities where one person, or half the class, has all the information, and the rest none, also make for authentic communication: those in the know must give instructions to those in the dark. Someone, for example, might have a geometric design and must give the others precise instructions for drawing exactly the same thing. Or, using Lego, one group of students could give another instructions to make a specific model. Practical exercises which can be recorded and compared with a native speaker’s performance – scientific experiments, making things, assembling component parts of a puzzle, describing the differences between a corkscrew and a bottle-opener etc., can also help learners to gradually build up a ‘native speaker-type intuition’ (though they are not necessarily easy to organise in a traditional classroom set-up). Sandra Savignon way back in 1972 took a slightly more radical view. She felt that experience in ‘authentic’ communication should not be delayed until the learner has a basic set of grammatically correct sentences. Trial and error learning should be used straight away: skill-getting is achieved through skill-using. Her students (English speakers learning French) were introduced to simple kinds of role-play activity very early on. They would enact a situation in English on greetings, for example, watch the same situation enacted in French by native speakers, and then discuss the differences. They then would re-enact the situation in English using French gesture before moving on to try it entirely in French (verbally and non-verbally). Needless to say they had to learn a lot of useful expressions – ‘Je ne comprends pas’, ‘Comment dit-on …?’, ‘Eh bien, … ’, ‘truc’, ‘machin’, etc. – right from the start. What I would suggest for bridging the skill-getting and skill-using gap are activities where learners are playing a part in situations which are not predictable – e.g. role-play (seeChapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo), ‘Playing a Part’). 1.5 Accuracy versus fluency (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) Teaching communicative competence means a reassessment of our attitude towards error. Having decided that perfection at the pattern drill level is not enough, and that communicative competence is our goal, are we going to allow our learners to make mistakes? And if so, to what extent and of what kind? In the late 1970s there was a swing away from the idea that every mistake should be stamped out immediately or else the student would develop bad habits which were then impossible to get rid of. It was also believed that emphasis on correct production at all times could lead to serious inhibitions in the learner. Instead, making mistakes was considered to be a necessary part of a foreign learner’s progress towards mastery of the language, or their ‘interlanguage’, the sum total of their knowledge of the language at any given moment, which is constantly changing. It was thought that these mistakes would right themselves in the normal process of things as the learner received more information. They would not right themselves however unless the learner was encouraged to test out the hypotheses they are continually making about the new language, that is, unless they were given the opportunity to make mistakes. When a learner acquires a new word or structure or function, they can only find out what the boundaries of its use are by trying it out in different contexts. If they are always terrified of making a mistake, they will never really come to master that piece of language but only have a partial understanding of it. What this means for the classroom is that once students have had an opportunity to practise a new bit of language in a fairly controlled way, they should be able to try it out on their own without too much interference from the teacher. Hypothesis-testing mistakes must of course be corrected so that the learner can widen or narrow boundaries, but this needn’t be done on the spot. As teachers, we need to develop sensitivity as to when and how to correct (see the section ‘Dealing with Mistakes’ in Chapter 2 (#u6c0ceb3a-ac49-585a-b1d4-5b847ad8ffda)). Chapter 2Limbering up (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) 2.1 Getting in the mood (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) In this chapter we shall be looking at activities for the classroom which encourage students to get to know – and trust – one another and which help them gradually build up their confidence. All of these ideas have actually been used with foreign learners – most of them with adults, and one or two of them with children – and they have worked successfully. Activities involving simulation and role-play (seeChapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)) require a certain amount of psychological preparation: there is a need to break the students in gently and gradually overcome any inhibitions that they may quite naturally feel. Although most young children seem to take to role-play activities like ducks to water, some adult students who have never done anything quite like it, and many adolescent students, are less enthusiastic. They are afraid of being made to look silly in front of their fellow students, and exposed to their criticism. A teacher who rushes into this type of activity without adequate preparation exercises runs the risk of scaring their students off for good. Building up the students’ confidence, creating an atmosphere of trust (see 2.4 ‘Getting to know you games’ below), teaching the students to relax – all these things take time and demand exercises where the individuals in a class are working together, getting to know each other well. The activities in this chapter are designed to have this effect, and include games, group and pair exercises intended to loosen up the class and create a relaxed and harmonious atmosphere conducive to role-play activities. Even physical exercises are mentioned: they relax people physically and so make them less inhibited generally. The exercises described in this chapter should ideally be used over a period of time – one or two of them could be brought into every lesson. 2.2 Possible problems (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) Before describing the activities, I should like to mention two difficulties that can arise. The first problem is a physical one: in classrooms with fixed desks all facing forwards in rows, group-work is difficult, and having people move around is even more difficult. If teaching is to be truly communicative then it almost goes without saying that the teacher should not be the focus of attention all the time but that the interaction should be general. Seating the students in a large circle is ideal as it means that every student is in contact with both the teacher and every other student, and a large space is left in the middle for activities that require a lot of room. I know that not all classrooms lend themselves to the circular layout, however, so we have to make the most of what we have. The second problem is one of discipline, if the learners are not adults. This can be a very serious problem and often deters teachers from embarking on a noisy and potentially riotous activity! Three points should be mentioned here. Firstly, the physical grouping of the class is an important factor: the circular arrangement suggested above enables the teacher to be in eye contact with everyone and does seem to give them more control than other groupings. Also of prime importance is motivation: students who are interested in what is going on in the classroom and who find it relevant, realistic and fun will be less likely to cause trouble. Thirdly, the gradual build-up advocated in the last section should make it easier for all the members of a class to participate and to relate well to one another. This harmony tends to work against potentially disruptive students. 2.3 Dealing with mistakes (#ue2571156-f7b0-583e-b158-6fa422d45236) We have already mentioned the treatment of error (see ‘Accuracy versus fluency’ in Chapter 1 (#u87a66c56-3f99-5669-a025-ce6d7948744a)) and the importance of focusing on fluency rather than accuracy in communicative language practice. The students will probably make quite a few mistakes, so what should a teacher do when, having vowed not to interfere, they hear a mistake that makes their hair stand on end? There are ways of dealing with these ‘bad’ mistakes without disrupting the activity and alarming the student concerned. Mario Rinvolucri advocates ‘hot correction’ in group work: he slips a piece of paper to the student with the correction written on it – feeling that if he leaves it until later the student will have forgotten what it was all about. Even this tends to be a little disruptive at first, although it is much less so with a group of students who are really used to the technique. Teachers can also keep a note of any mistakes they hear, and go through them anonymously when the activity has finished, by writing them up on the board and inviting corrections from the whole class. If several students are making the same mistake, it is worth planning a follow-up lesson to deal with the point. An option with a small group may be to record the activity in audio or video and play it back to the students. The playback is both enjoyable and profitable as it normally provokes a good deal of discussion. Students can make suggestions themselves as to what they should or might have said in those circumstances. (It is worthwhile teaching the students to use the equipment so that they are able to record themselves.) Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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