Communicative classrooms

If our goal is the communicative language ability, then practicing communitive tasks is the path to reach this goal, and in this domain ‘Brumfit’ listed a set of criteria for achieving communication’s fluency, as that the focus in those activities should be on the meaning and not the form because using the language is the tool that will lead for communication, and the used language should be relevant to the students’ needs to give them the chance to produce ideas, information, and opinions.

Brumfit also argued that students should not be reliant on the teacher or the material of the language, but they should have a space for negotiations, predictions (opinion gap), and the use of the four learning skills, as the teacher’s role, should be minimal to save the communication from being blocked.

Prabhu, on his turn gave a useful typology of activities that are based on how to create a gap of information or opinion to open a normal discourse, like the information gap activity which involves the transfer of information from one person to another; it is a give and take instruction to build a full image of the topic.

Also, there is the reasoning gap activity and the opinion gap activity, where the first involves deriving new information from the data that we already have through analyzing and discussing, while the second identifies and articulates a personal preference, feeling, or attitude in a response to a given situation through discussions and debates.

On the other hand, Skehan pointed that time pressure plays a great emphasis to force students to communicate without paying much attention to the completeness of the language form because they need to finish the task quickly. Therefore, they may use the lexical phrases to express ideas instead of building sentences from isolated vocabulary and worrying about the correct structure of the sentence.

Having said all above, leads us to a dangerous fact of developing the ‘undesirable fluency’ by using incorrect forms in communications, which students may use in other tasks.Thus, we need to help students to become more accurate too, by giving them the chance to prepare the content of what they are going to say and focus on the correct expression, or giving them the opportunity to record the communicative task and focus on the form in it after finishing it, or even the teacher can rewrites students text by following the ideas closely but improving the language to the students, to compare her work to there’s and use a cycle of preparatory with follow-up tasks as in the PPP theory to create a balance between accuracy and fluency activities.