Unit 17 - Practice activities and tasks for language and skills development

Practice activities and tasks for language and development

This unit taught a lot about the activities and tasks that give opportunities to learners to use the language and develop appropriacy in any skill. also another characteristic of practicing these activities to develop speaking and writing skills with students is that the can be controlled which gives students practice in accuracy and form and allow them to make some mistakes, some example of these can be: Copying words, jazz chants, individual,choral, substitution and transformation drills, freer activities on the contrary  to use the language they want, some examples of them are: discussion, problem-solving,sharing, rank ordering, writing emails and compositions and at last we have free tasks (no control) just instructions and here students use the language they know already using role-plays, information-gap activities,sentence completion, gap-filling and surveys. All of these tasks give the teacher and pupil a variety of uses and purposes. In contrast to develop the listening and the reading skills teacher can use controlled, freer and free tasks because they are receptive not productive skills, instead we can use the different subskills for example for reading we can use multiple choice questions, jumbled pictures and jigsaw readings to evaluate comprehension and specific information. and for listening  we can use multiple choice questions, true/false questions, form filling and table completion which help students to look for general ideas and details. 

To apply these information in  our teaching I would recommend to mix activities and focus on maximum 2 features like for example accuracy and fluency because that way the lesson will be great for students, also teachers should try to find out which activities do learners like the most and then look for tasks to explode that advantage and make the pupils learn the way they like to develop each of the skills.

References
User, S. (2014). Heads Up English | ESL Lessons - Controlled to Free Activities. Headsupenglish.com. Retrieved 6 December 2014, from http://www.headsupenglish.com/index.php/esl-articles/esl-lesson-structure/310-

controlled-to-free-activities Eslhq.com,. (2014). Controlled and Uncontrolled Classroom Activity/Game - Teaching ESL - eslHQ . Retrieved 6 December 2014, from http://www.eslhq.com/forums/esl-forums/teaching-esl/controlled-uncontrolled-classroom-activity-game-15633/





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