1 7.3.5. Making language exercises into real exchanges

Wanting to communicate means having a good reason for doing so. We are not very interested in telling someone something they already know. Similarly, we do not particularly want to be told something we can already see for ourselves. There is only a limited point in saying ‘She is wearing a green dress’, if both the child and the teacher can see the same picture. In this situation the only reason for the child to make the statement is to check it or to please the teacher. And pleasing the teacher has its limitations as a motivating factor. We have a much stronger reason for communicating if we are offering or seeking information that is not already shared.

There are plenty of classroom activities, which provide an extremely useful combination of real communication and quite deliberate rehearsal of a clearly identified set of fairly restricted material. They can involve any of the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, but their biggest contribution at primary level is probably in the field of spoken interaction between children. Because the range of language items can be limited without destroying the element of real communication, the teacher can leave the children talking to each other without fear that the need to communicate will lead them to lapse totally into their mother tongue. That is why so-called ‘information gap’ activities continue to be so popular in the language classroom. Look at the following example. It is a ‘describe and arrange’ activity.

The pair of children sit opposite each other and erect a visual barrier so that neither can see what the other is doing. The barrier can be a textbook or two flat folders propped against each other and held with a paper clip. Each child has the same base picture sheet and a set of small pictures of items relating to it. In this case, it is an outline of a room and various furniture items to arrange in it.

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Child A starts to arrange the furniture in the room. By co-operative question/ answer exchanges the pair participants have to get child B’s furniture arranged identically but they may not look at each other’s pictures. So B can ask ‘Where is the chair?’ or, better, ‘Is the chair next to the door?’ which introduces an element of guessing. You will find that this kind of ‘describe and arrange’ activity is one where children take imaginative liberties. They arrange fridges on roofs and bicycles in the bathroom in order to confuse matters by being unpredictable.

There is real communication here in the sense that one of the participants has information that is needed by the other. At the same time, however, the linguistic demands are realistically contained. The elements may be recombined by the children to suit their own purposes, but the language being used is limited to a few objects and a set of prepositions which will have been practised thoroughly beforehand. There is thus some room for unpredictability and choice within security of a limiting framework.