Student A: Have you ever eaten snails?
Student B: Yes, I have.
Student A: Have you ever climbed a mountain?
Student B: No, I haven’t.
This type of activity involves students in a discussion but the language is very
controlled and is pre-determined by the teacher. Such activities are useful at lower
levels or where the objective is to get students producing language automatically
without having to think about it too much.
Whilst controlled language practice will help with automatic reactions, it does not
replicate real-world conversations. The example above is very false, it appears to be
an interrogation and there is no sharing of information. In real-life, student A might
reply: “so what did you think of Mexico? I might be going there on holiday myself”.
Teachers should try to incorporate activities that imitate real-life conversations in the
classroom as much as possible in order to prepare students for conversations in the
real world.
In free language practice, students use all and any language they know to express
themselves. An example of free language practice is a classroom debate on smoking
in public. Students give their opinions, others agree or disagree, and counter
arguments are put forward. There are no limits on the language that can be used,
except for staying polite! There is a greater emphasis on this type of activity at higher
levels. For more examples of free language practice, see Chapter 4, Speaking.
Alternatively, the teacher might create situations where certain language is likely to be
used. For example, when talking about holiday plans, future tenses will probably be
used; in an interview simulation, the present perfect (I’ve never worked in a shop
before) and simple past (I worked for the council from 2000 to 2004) will probably be
used. We can predict what might be used but the actual language output is very
unpredictable and can contain almost any language the students know. This is
sometimes known as freer practice. This type of task is useful to practise a language
structure that has been presented recently where it is unnecessary to engage the
students in controlled practice.
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