Theory of communicative activity

A situation in which people are busy doing different things in order to achieve a particular aim is called activity. Speech activity is a purposeful interaction of people via language. As any other activity, it has a motive or reason for the interlocutors to communicate. When we have something to say, want to get/receive information or convey our thoughts, we start communicating with other people. When we are interested in other peoples’ ideas or information, we read or listen to them. Without any particular reason speech activity does not exist.

The subject of speech activity is someone else’s thought, idea or message. Speech (both written and oral) is realized by language means (phonetic, lexical, and grammatical). The product of speech activity in speaking is an utterance, in writing - a text, and in listening and reading is comprehension. The result of speech activity may be expressed in the reaction to it, for example, a reply or answer of a person, fulfilling some actions and the like.

In FLT methodology there are two terms task and activity, which are very often used interchangeably. Though activity is the most general term for the units of which a lesson consists of, task (according to G. Crookes, C. Chandon) is a less-controlled activity, which produces realistic use of foreign language. According to Nunan, task or activity is the smallest unit of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language. It is important in this respect to cover the theory of activity done by Jim Scrivener. He distinguishes five steps of activity procedure:

•lead-in or pre-activity introduction; used to raise motivation or interest, or perhaps to focus on language items.

•set up the activity- first step of activity; clear instructions, sometimes demonstrations or examples are done.

•run the activity - activity itself; when the material is well-prepared and the instructions clear, students can work on the task without too much interference.

•close the activity - final step of activity which may be at the same time the first step of another one;

•post activity - follow up stage, where some kind of feedback should be given.

If lesson is seen as a set of activities, then activity procedure evidently follows the steps of lesson procedure. A great variety of activities can be proposed in the English lesson. One of the classifications is done in table 25, where activities are differentiated according to the level of teacher control and are labeled as controlled (manipulated), semi-controlled and free (communicative). Speech activities can also be classified according to the mode of interaction as individual and. Simultaneous autonomous fulfillment of some language exercises and tasks in listening, reading, writing; individual students' replies; working in chain at the lesson can be called individual activities. Different variants of cooperative interaction - pair work (open/closedpairs); group work; whole class interaction (mingle activity/choir work)

-are called cooperative activities.

Activities should be arranged in such a way that an easy activity must be followed by a more difficult one; a very active one with a quieter one, etc. The activities should be ordered logically - from more controlled to freer. Teacher should think over the character of the activity proposed and his/her own role in managing it. Each lesson stage after some set of activities should be supported by an appropriate feedback.

e.g. Topic: GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF the USA

Warmer (revision): Competition "How many words do you know?" Write as many English words and word-combinations for the topic in 5 minutes. Compare

your lists with the person sitting next to you; correct the mistakes and count the words. Which list will be the longest one?

Topic: WRITING LETTERS.

Warmer: (pre-teach) Game "Jigsaw sentences". Teacher gives a set of jigsaw sentences to each pair or group of students and asks them to make up and read three sensible sentences. The sentences are related to the topic of the lesson.

Warmers or warming up activities, ice-breakers, brainstorming, regrouping activities, information gap, jigsaw, problem-solving and decision-making, opinion exchange, games, role-play and simulations, drama, projects, interviews, making surveys are typical activities of interactive classroom which motivate learners to participate using the target language. The majority of them are communicative or free.

Special attention should be given to the characteristic of communicative/free activities as they are the goal in communicative classroom. As any speech activity, a communicative activity is purposeful. Teacher should create a communicative purpose motivating learners to fulfill a stated communicative task. That will create a desire to communicate, without which communication will fail. Free, communicative activity focuses on content, first and foremost, not on form, as the priority is given to fluency of speech, its appropriacy to the situation, but not to grammatical accuracy. Students are free to express themselves, thus a variety of language is used. Such kinds of activities encourage students to communicate without teacher intervention or material control as in real life.

The biggest challenge for teacher during a lesson is converting exercises written in a textbook into classroom activities, to state a communicative task which is a must for communicative classroom. Sometimes instructions to exercises may leave teacher uncertain as to the management of classroom realization of it, its conversion into activity. For example, a typical instruction may be as follows:

Fill in the words from the list or Underline the correct word then explain your choice. How can teacher break the monotony and convert the exercise into exciting activity? Below there is a variant of group work activity for intermediate students based on the exercises mentioned.

The class is divided into 2 groups. The leader from each group is given a list of words/word-combinations/half-sentences. They are different but interconnected (e.g. if group 1 has a beginning of a sentence/idiom/fixed phrase in the list, then group 2 possesses its end). The leaders dictate the lists to their groups (checking spelling against the key may follow). Then comes pair work when a student from group 1 interacts with a student from group 2 and they do matching activity. Graphically the structure of the activity may be noted into the teacher's lesson plan as in Chart 1.

Chart 1. Exercises borrowed from coursebooks are converted into classroom activities for the sake of maintaining learners' motivation and promoting success in task. Such a conversion needs some organizational efforts on the teacher's part, which are worth doing. Successful learning activities are built on the interests that students bring to the classroom or create that interest as part of their design.

14. Teaching communicative skills: listening.

When we speak about teaching a foreign language, we first of all have in mind teaching it as a means of communication. Essential to all interaction is the ability to understand what others are saying. It has been estimated by W. Rivers, M. Temperly that of the time adults spend in communication activities 45% is devoted to listening, only 30% to speaking, 16 % to reading and a mere 9% to writing.

Apart from communicative interaction, much of the enjoyment in foreign language use comes from listening activities - watching films and plays; listening to radio broadcasts, songs; talks by native speakers. Even in class students learn a great deal from listening to their teacher, to tapes or records, or to each other. In this respect listening is one of the most important skills and a challengeable activity in a foreign language teaching, and the importance of being a successful listener can hardly be overestimated.

Features:

•According to its role in the process of communication, listening is reactive (+ reading), not initiative (as speaking and writing).

•Listening is a receptive skill, a developed or acquired ability to receive and perceive some oral information.

•The product of listening is deduction; the result - comprehension, understanding of the information heard; the subject of listening is someone else’s thought.

Major requirements for school leavers’ listening skills (B1 level of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages):

"The learner should understand the main points of clear standard speech on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc.; can understand the main point of many radio or TV programmes on current affairs or topics of personal or professional interest when the delivery is relatively slow and clear."

Teacher should take into consideration the following factors which can ensure success in developing learners' listening skills:

Linguistic material for listening (phonetic, lexical, grammatical);

Content of the material suggested for listening comprehension (learners' familiarity with the subject/topic of communication; type of communication - description, narration; way the narrative progresses - chronological or narrative order; form of communication - dialogue, monologue; understanding of the cultural context, observation and interpretation of the circumstances of the utterance);

Conditions in which the material is presented (speed of speech; number of presentations; visual "props"- objects, pictures, photos, motions, etc.; voice of the speaker; recorded or alive presentation).

To overcome the difficulties teacher should realize how the physiological process of listening goes on. Before input is stored in our long-term memory (LTM) it must first be processed in the short-term memory (STM) which works very quickly. Underwood draws a distinction between ’echoic’ memory (about one second), short-term memory (a few seconds) and a long-term memory. The echoic

memory ‘freezes’ the message while the short-term memory works on making sense of what has been heard. The short term memory is the type of memory we use when we need to remember something for a limited time only - for example, a new telephone number while we are dialing it. Unfortunately, its natural limit is seven characters (chunks of information) or, with some people, even less than that. So it has to operate very quickly to enable people to understand spoken messages. Information kept in the short term memory needs to be transferred to the long term memory if it is not going to be forgotten by the listener. The long term memory is where information is stored for a relatively long time. After the message has been understood, the sense is stored in LTM while the actual words disappear from our memory.

For example, I can remember what my parents told me on the telephone yesterday, but I cannot remember the exact words that they used.

Listeners may often have problems if they try to understand every word using their knowledge of the structure of language. They tend to get confused and will probably be less successful than listeners who seek the meaning without focusing too much on language. This approach of trying to understand every word is known as the serial ‘bottom-up’ model. It assumes that we perceive speech by building up an interpretation in a series of separate stages, beginning with the lowest-level units (phonemes) and gradually working up to the larger units such as utterance, trying to comprehend the meaning of the whole grasping each piece of information. From that we then derive our interpretation of speaker's meaning.

When listening to our native language our attention is focused on the meaning a speaker is trying to convey, rather than on the language (and other) sounds he/she is producing. Adult native listeners do not perceive speech phoneme-by-phoneme, or word-by-word. They use existing knowledge of the world to help them to work out a

reasonable interpretation of what they have heard. So, if a speaker says one word incorrectly, the listener is likely to be able to work out what was meant.

For example, if a speaker seems to say 'I'm getting up at seven o'clock this morning', the listener is likely to find it easy to interpret this as 'I got up at seven o'clock1 by using their knowledge of the world and their knowledge of the language. This is the top-down model of listening comprehension where the listener focuses on the meaning the speaker is trying to convey rather than on the language sounds he is producing.

For successful listening comprehension and development of auditory abilities of learners both models should be practised in variety of exercises. First of all, auditory abilities of learners are trained and practised in preparatory or drilling exercises aimed at overcoming linguistic difficulties (lexical, grammatical, phonetic) and at development of speech mechanism of listening (logical thinking, prediction, attention, auditory memory). Then learners are proposed speech exercises and communicative activities in listening texts, recordings, conversations, etc. In communicative language classroom a usual framework for teaching listening is three-phased: pre-listening, while-listening, post-listening.

On the pre-listening stage learners are prepared for grasping the information. In order to facilitate listening teacher may provoke discussion to introduce the topic, to arose learners’ interest or create (according to Roger Gover) a ‘need to know’ by telling them how the listening task fits in with a later activity they are going to do. The stage may contain some pre-teach exercises to diminish learners’ difficulties in grammar or vocabulary.

While-listening stage is the listening itself. Traditionally, the first listening is focused on an overall understanding while the second listening on more detailed

understanding of the text. The ways of feedback in teaching listening skills may be very different. Teacher can use both verbal and non-verbal means to check learners’ understanding.

Post-listening activities may include a variety of follow-up study ranging from the development of speaking or writing skills to practising language aspects. Learners can be involved into different kinds of interaction-based activities, such as What do you think? discussions or debates in pairs or groups, pre-writing exercises expressing their opinion on the problems arisen in the material listened to and so on. They can be focused on specific vocabulary or grammar structures used in the text with following practising the issues, etc.

15. Teaching communicative skills: speaking.

The value and role of developed speaking skills in effective communication can hardly be exaggerated. Spoken or oral communication is known by its spontaneous, unplanned character, informal style and some peculiarities in syntax.

Features

•According to its role in the process of communication speaking is initiative

(+writing), not reactive (as reading and listening).

•Speaking is a productive skill, a developed or acquired ability to produce and reproduce some information orally.

•The product of speaking is utterance; the result is the ability to produce an utterance with the help of all necessary phonetic, lexical and grammatical means; the subject of speaking is someone's thought.

Major requirements for school leavers’ listening skills (B1 level of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages):

In spoken interaction the learner should deal with most situations likely to arise whilst traveling in an area where the language is spoken. He / she can enter unprepared into conversation on topics that are familiar, of personal interest or pertinent to everyday life (e.g. family, hobbies, work, travel and current events).

In spoken production the learner should connect phrases in a simple way in order to describe experiences and events, his / her dreams, hopes and ambitions. The learner can briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. He / she can narrate a story or relate the plot of a book or a film and describe his / her reactions.

Main aims and general purposes, according to G. Brown and G. Yule, of speaking in real-life interaction are giving and receiving information (such message- oriented aim produces transactional language), collaborating in doing something, sharing personal experiences and opinions with a view to building social relationships. To reach this aim the learner has to be competent in an interactional language, the language for maintaining social relationships.

The development of speaking follows the same pattern both in the mother tongue and in a foreign language from reception to reproduction. The psychological characteristics of oral language are as follows:

•Speech must be motivated, i.e. the speaker expresses a desire to inform the listener of something interesting, important, or to get information from him / her (inner or outward motivation). The learners’ desire should be stimulated by the teacher in a classroom situation.

•Speech is always addressed to an interlocutor (a person taking part in a conversation or discussion). Every speaker needs a listener.

•Speech is always emotionally coloured for the speaker expresses his / her thoughts, feelings, his / her attitude to what he / she says.

•Speech is always situational for it takes place in a certain situation.

Language learners are considered successful if they can communicate effectively

in the target language, producing good fluency of speech, whereas some decades ago the accuracy of the language produced would most likely be the major criterion of a success or a failure of student’s performance. These two notions - fluency and accuracy - are of utmost importance when we speak about the development of speaking skills. Nowadays the focus of attention in language teaching has been shifted from accuracy to fluency, from grammatically correct production to communicative adequacy and appropriacy.

Classroom communication is viewed as a mirror of authentic communication that occurs in the real world. However, this does not mean that a focus on accuracy

has no place in a communicative classroom. The proponents of communicative language teaching understand that if we force communication too early without regard for accuracy it can result in early fossilization of inaccurate production. Without grammar accuracy affective communication can hardly take place. Providing the slogan fluency before accuracy the proponents of communicative teaching do not deny the importance of teaching grammar but make it possible through communicative means.

There are two forms of speaking: monologue and dialogue. Each form has its own peculiarities. Monologue is a one-way process, not intended for reactive response. Dialogue is the process of speaking interaction between two or more participants, conversation or discussion in which opinions are exchanged. Both forms of speaking possess certain communicative functions in speech. For example, informative function - giving information, description of events, actions, states (for monological speech), giving and receiving information (for dialogical speech). Besides, monological speech has influential (encouraging, warning, persuasion), expressive (declining emotional stress), entertaining, religious- ritual (speech during some religious acts) functions. Communicating in dialogical speech people do not only inform each other, but also give and receive proposals (in the form of request, order, advice), share personal experience and opinions, state and justify their opinions, persuade other people.

Dialogue reflects the rules and procedures that govern face-to-face encounters. The basic to the management of a collaborative process in conversation is the turn- taking system. Dialogues progress as a series of “turns”, at any moment the speaker may become the listener; these role exchanges constitute the nature of turns. The role of topics discussed has also a great importance in a language interaction. The acquisition of strategic competence, the ability to repair trouble spots and potential breakdowns in communication is one more significant rule in a dialogue procedure, together with the syntax and register of a conversational discourse.

There are different approaches to teaching dialogue. Two major strategies are:

a top-down strategy and a bottom-up strategy. The first is starting dialogue acquisition with the global listening of the whole dialogue, then learning and mastering it. The second means mastering separate elements of a dialogue, then gradually it goes to an autonomous production, i.e. "up" level of the acquisition.

Ukrainian scholars N.K.Skliarenko and T.I.Olijnyk consider a dialogical unit the basic unit in teaching dialogical speech. A dialogical unit (or lead-response, according to G.Rogova) is structurally, phonetically and semantically organized series of turns.

The first turn in a dialogical unit is always of an initiative character (it can be called leading or encouraging turn). It guides the conversation, begins it, stimulates the dialogue and helps to develop and increase it.

The second turn possesses a reactive or reactive-initiative character. If the

turn is purely reactive, it means its absolute dependence on the first turn. If it is reactive-initiative, it includes reaction / response and encouragement to further conversation.

e.g. (reactive) - What would you like to eat?

-A meat sandwich.

(reactive-initiative) - Is lunch ready?

-Yes. Let's have lunch in the garden.

According to the communicative function of the first turn a dialogical unit may be divided into three groups:

Ia) statement - statement; e.g. I like the weather. So do I.

a)statement - question; e.g. I like the weather. Do you?

b)statement - inducement / encouragement; e.g. -1 like the weather.

Let's go for a walk, then!

IIa) inducement / encouragement - agreement; e.g. Drop in any time! Oh, withpleasure!

b)inducement / encouragement - disagreement; e.g. Drop in any time! Sorry, I'm afraidIcan't.

c)inducement / encouragement - question.

e.g. Drop in any time! What about Sunday?

(advice, proposal, invitation, request, order, instruction)

III a) Question - response;

b)Question - question.

According to S.Yu. Nikolaeva, N.K. Skliarenko and T.I. Olijnyk, the logical sequence of stages in teaching dialogue, is as follows:

0zero - preparation stage, where learners practice giving response to the appropriate stimulus (familiar receptive-reproductive and relatively-communicative exercises)

1stage - mastering dialogical units;

IIstage - microdialogues;

IIIstage - the autonomous production of a dialogue.

All the stages should be supplemented with a variety of exercises. Learners should experience all the structures of a dialogical speech to avoid artificial and unnatural character of a classroom dialogue. They are expected to possess the following

dialogical skills:

•to begin, to initiate a conversation using the appropriate structures;

•to give quick and correct response;

•to support and stimulate a conversation using encouraging phrases;

•to produce dialogues of different communicative types grouped on speech situations done;

•to interrupt the speaker politely and repair trouble spots in a conversation.

In teaching monologue Galina Rogova distinguishes three stages according to the levels which constitute the ability to speak: the statement level; the utterance level; the discourse level. On the statement level different linguistically structured activities will be of help, combining different phrases into one utterance. At the second stage of monologue development some “performance” activities can be used (those in which the student prepares beforehand and delivers a message to a group in a usual classroom setting). At the third stage students participate in communicative activities in a natural setting.

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