UNIT 17

Practice activities and tasks for language and skills development

   From this unit I learnt that teachers can design tasks and activities to give learners opportunities to practice and increase their ability to use language. Those activities and tasks can vary from controlled to freer activities where students will be dealing with new vocabulary, grammatical structures, etc. depending on the subkills  (for reading: skimming or scanning, for listening: recognizing contracted forms in connected speech, for speaking: pronunciation and intonation and for writing: organizational and editing skills) that students are going to develop during the lessons.

    Regarding to the controlled activities, those are restricted tasks because the teacher set up activities that gives students the opportunity to practice in accuracy and allow students to make few or no mistakes, examples of restricted activities are drills, copying words or sentences, multiple choice, etc. Free activities by contrast, allow learners to use the language they want. Examples of free activities are: writing emails, stories, invitations etc. Freer activities on the other hand are most predictable for teachers, they can figure out about the language their students will use when doing the tasks. So, here students will make use of the language thy already known and the language have just learned. Examples of these activities are: role plays, information gaps, sentence completion, etc.

   So, I considered this information totally meaningful because we cannot use wherever activity in the classroom. We have to know when and how to use certain activities to give students the opportunity to use their imagination and feel free of writing or saying something by using the language they know. Besides, it is important to have some control on the activities as well because it will help students not to make mistakes all the time.

 I suggest you to visit these links to find more information about the topic:

•     Cotter C. (2010) Heads Up English Controlled to Free Activities

www.headsupenglish.com/index.php/esl-articles/esl-lesson-structure/310-controlled-to-free-activities

•  Video: Teaching Grammar - getting creative with controlled practice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-bib16PF20