Page 206 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 13: Setting Their Tongues Wagging: Speaking and Discussion
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This warmer is good for getting a team spirit going right from the begin- ning of the lesson.
✓ Current affairs: Noting what’s going on in the world often leads to some interesting discussions in the classroom. You can just write a headline on the board, or stick up an image from a newspaper and ask the students what they know about it. Then get their opinions on the story. It works best when you find a humorous story or one with a hint of controversy (but nothing that may offend or hit or a raw nerve).
Talking about communicative activities
This kind of activity has been popular for many years now in TEFL. Communicative activities generally involve pairs of students sharing informa- tion with each other to complete a task.
Communicative activities come in many different forms but usually involve a Partner A and a Partner B. Each partner needs to ask each other fact or opinion-based questions after receiving initial prompts from you. Sometimes you give them a worksheet which has gaps in it but the gaps are different for each partner. The pair must then hide their own sheet and come up with a question to ask their partner who, as a result, gives them information that they use to fill in a gap. On the other hand the activity may perhaps involve a list of topics or situations to ask a partner about so that the students talk about their own lives.
Communicative activities are practical because they often don’t require any imagination or opinions from the participants. They just provide a context for some solid practice of a particular grammatical structure or some new words.
This type of exercise also accustoms students to working with each other and gets them moving about a bit. As in most cases the students aren’t allowed to see each others’ information, you can get them to sit or stand back to back, for example.
Table 13-1 is an example of a communicative activity designed to practise the phrase ‘How much is/how much are the . . . ?’