Modifying Activities to Make Them Communicative

Last month, I worked as a coach for Martina Bex and Elicia Cardenas' online Acquisition Boot Camp course (ABC). An early lesson in the course addressed "Making Activities Purposeful and Communicative." According to Bill Van Patten, "Communication is the interpretation, expression, and/or negotiation of meaning for a purpose, in a given context." In a nutshell, we want to ensure that the activities which we implement in our classrooms have a true communicative purpose in the context of a classroom, meaning:

• We should ensure that there is a interpretation, expression or negotiation of meaning. Our purpose should be that we wish to discover and learn information about each other, ourselves, and the world around us through communication and input. So having students interact with you as the teacher through processing questions and PQA's, TPRS, doing a Movie Talk or calendar talk, and having students read and interact with a text are some examples of activities which are purposefully communicative. In each of those examples, an interpretation, expression, or negotiation of meaning is occurring. However, grammar-related activities (such as conjugating in context, parsing) are not communicative in nature.
• At the same time, this communication needs to occur in a realistic context and setting. Therefore, since we as teachers are communicating in a classroom, our communication needs to reflect what would occur in a classroom. The traditional textbook dialogues/role plays of "a trip to the doctor's office," "ordering a train ticket," and "maneuvering through the airport" are not truly communicative, because they are artificially set and delivered in a classroom context (and not in a doctor's office, train station, airport). If you wish to do those dialogues, then students need to be in those actual environments for these activities to have a true setting.

One of my roles as a coach was to respond to/interact with participant comments on the daily lesson discussion boards, and this particular topic always sparks much discussion from participants. For many this was a very eye-opening and somewhat pedagogical-challenging lesson. However, for the most part, participants were in agreement with the concept of implementing purposeful-communicative classroom activities, but the major questions were "What does this look like?" "What about activities like Kahoot and GimKit?" and "Does this mean that I have to create new classroom activities?"

First off, let me say/echo what Martina and Elicia say in this lesson: This is not to say that EVERY lesson and activity must be communicative in purpose. Believe me, there are days when you as the teacher and students both need a break so you play Vocabulary BINGO. And I love a good GimKit! However, so many of our existing "non-communicative" classroom activities can become communicative in nature through some modifications. Here are some examples:

• Textbook dialogues and culture topics - instead of having students do a role play/dialogue of going to the doctors' office (which quite honestly, students are simply memorizing and parroting those dialogues), embed these dialogues into a reading (such as Anna must go to the doctor, because her mother is sick), where the dialogue has been inserted as part of something bigger. Because the dialogue is now in a reading which you are teaching, the dialogue has been contextualized into your classroom setting. So for those of you who must cover a camping unit in your curriculum (why is camping considered a necessary cultural topic to cover??), create a reading about characters who go camping - perhaps a character writes a diary entry about going camping!
• GimKit/Kahoot/Blooket - I love using these web app tools for vocabulary review, but so often we present the vocabulary as isolated terms. A simple modification would be to present these vocabulary words in the context of sentences from a reading. For example, instead of a GimKit question being asked as "gemma," rewrite the question as a sentence from a reading, e.g., "Latrones non GEMMAS habebant." Now negotiation and interpretation of meaning are occurring due to the context of a sentence, and it is no longer presented as an isolated term (because vocabulary rarely occurs isolated in communication). Also, consider asking comprehension questions in the target language and character description questions such as "who would say this?" "Whom does this sentence describe?" "What sentence best describes Character X?", "Where is Character X in this reading?" in a GimKit/Kahoot/Blooket to make the activity more communicative. 
• BINGO - Students love BINGO, so I am not opposed to having students play it when I need a break. However, I do like Martina Bex's extension use of BINGO as a precursor for a timed write.

So take a look at your activities and consider making some modifications to make them more communicative in nature!