Communicative Activities

Abstract

The communicational syllabus with its emphasis on language use presupposes sufficient linguistic competence on the part of our pupils in order to participate in communicative activities. A teacher of weak language pupils will no doubt shout “most of my pupils cannot even make proper sentences (ie. well formed grammatical sentences). They are unwilling to talk. How can I then get them to communicate?” I am not discussing here the theoretical basis to communicative approaches to language teaching (please refer to Hymes, Labov, Halliday, Widdowson, Alwright et al.) but would like us to consider a few reasons for setting up communicative settings in which pupils can carry out language functions.