Communicative learning is a big part of any methodology when it comes to TESOL. Here are a few ideas for communicative language learning.
Effective Communicative Methods
The goal of the communicative approach is to have the student communicatively competent which means using the language to communicate, which is the most effective way to learn a language. Here are four major principles of communicative methodology for lesson planning.
Effective Communicative Techniques
Know what you are doing. The starting and end point of every lesson should be an operation of some kind which the student might actually want to perform in the foreign language. of course, this communicative trigger for eliciting students' responses should be tailored and adapted to meet the students' skills and abilities.
Example of a communicative activity: Asking open ended questions, wide enough to generate a variety of responses. Relating to current events could be a good starting point.
Communicative Learning
Learners learn by doing or in this case, speaking. Avoid random corrections of errors and allow students to share their ideas.
Information Gap Activities
The communicative information which is transferred is of the interpersonal (social) type rather than the factual.
Example of a communicative activity: Student A has pictures and student B has words, which when fitted together create a puzzle. In an ideal information gap activity, both students need to communicative and share information.
Remember: a mistake is not always a mistake. Grammatical and phonological mistakes hamper communication. However, a learner who makes mistakes because he or she is trying to do something he has not been told or shown how to which he has not yet mastered, is not really making a mistake at all.
