You have what I want

I suppose every teacher has their favourite type of activity. I’m really into information gap activities, i.e. activities which require students to speak and work with their classmates to obtain the missing information. And once they’ve acquired the information from their classmates, they can fill the “gap” and complete the task or activity. During these activities, students need to communicate clearly in order to successfully complete the given task.

Most of my classes work best if you get them to work in pairs or groups. An otherwise reticent group will turn into a chatterbox once I ask them to discuss, compare and share in pairs. Some coursebooks have ready-made information gap activities. To give an example, Student A must read a text on page x, while Student B turns to a different page to read another text on the same/related topic. Then they share what they’ve learned. But I mostly design these activities myself. The good news is that practically any exercise or task can be transformed into an information-gap activity.

Below are just a few examples I’ve recently used.

Pictures: I ask Student A to look at a picture for 30 seconds. Student B looks at a different picture on a different page. They close books and describe the pictures from memory. Then they can contrast both pictures without actually looking at them. Students look for the common theme and other similarities, as well as for differences. This can be a springboard for the topic you’d like to focus on in the lesson.

Gap-fills: I like to create two versions of a gap-fill, i.e. I use the same text but omit different words for Student A and different words for Student B. They work individually first and then they share their answers. If they are unsure about an answer, their partner helps them by describing the missing word.

Student A: They work 1 _____________ first and then they share their answers.

Student B: They work individually first and then they 1 _____________ their answers.

Keys: Students complete two run-of-the-mill exercises. When they finish, I give Student A the key to Student B’s exercise and vice versa. They check answers by sharing the keys. This is a time-saver and it’s much more interactive than sharing it as a whole class. Your only task is to monitor.

Half-a-crossword: This is by far the most favourite activity of mine. As the title suggests, you create a crossword where Student A has some words while the others are missing and Student B has the ones Student A needs. The task is to complete the whole crossword by exchanging the information.

A variation on running dictation: Each student picks a certain number of words from a list/text. They write them on a piece of paper. Alternatively, you can ask them to choose a longer sentence, e.g. from a coursebook text, or you can dictate one. Student A stands opposite their partner, a few meters apart. Student A remembers the first word from the list/sentence and runs to their partner. They describe the word and when Student B guesses it, they write it down. Student A runs for another word. When they are done with their list/sentence, they swap roles. The task is complete when both students have written the whole list/sentence. This could be done with pictures as well (see Activity 1).

Drawing: Find some suitable paintings/visuals on the internet. For example, like me, you can google the most famous paintings of all time (our topic was ART). Show one of them on the screen. Student A faces the screen and describes the picture to their partner who can’t see it. After a certain amount of time, they stop, look and compare their drawing to the original painting. Then they change roles. To make it more interesting and fun, before they can look at the original, they compare their drawings with other students’ creations. You can later set up an art exhibition (if students don’t mind displaying their products).

These are only a few examples of information-gap activities. The list is endless. And as I mentioned above, any task can be designed as an activity where students simply need to make a little bit more effort than usual to complete it, which, I believe, is something we should always strive for.

Is English a subject?

The notion that learning a foreign language is not the same as learning other subjects in a school curriculum is exhilarating as well as frightening. On the one hand, I feel like it gives us English teachers a lot of freedom. On the other hand, freedom comes with a lot of responsibility. While our colleagues usually teach their subjects by presenting and drilling facts, and then they check the students’ knowledge of those facts by asking display questions, on tests or otherwise, we ELTs have long suspected that such an approach will not help our students to become truly proficient in the target language.

What I mean is that our biology colleagues, for instance, can explicitly teach about their subject and so they can easily get away with a lecture, even in the primary education context. In other words, they can speak for 45 minutes nonstop while the pupils are just listening and taking notes. However, we English teachers can’t possibly adopt such an approach without feeling a bit guilty. Well, obviously, there are situations in which it is useful for your students to merely absorb L2 input. Some examples would be: reading a story, listening to a podcast, watching a movie in English, etc. But this is not what we typically do in the classroom anyway. This is what students do outside of the classroom and honestly, it has proved to be a very effective strategy for improving their language proficiency. So, throughout the lesson, it is our primary responsibility as teachers to make sure that our students get plenty of opportunities to use and do things in the target language. This is the part I’m 100% convinced of and comfortable with.

I’m still not sure how much time should be allocated for drills in an L2 classroom, though. As we all know, drilling refers to a type of audio-lingual technique based on students repeating a model provided by the teacher and the focus is on accuracy rather than fluency. For that reason, drills do come across as inauthentic. However, research shows that they are important to learning new vocabulary, for example (e.g. Alali and Schmitt 2012). As far as display questions are concerned, I plead guilty. I do use them too, especially with lower-level classes. I understand that the problem with display questions (also called known-information questions) is that they are a type of question for which the answer is already clear and teachers ask just to see if the learners know the answer. Again, this makes them appear somewhat phoney. Thus, even with young students, I try to include referential and open-ended questions as much as I can.

It’s also worth mentioning that unlike in other subjects, such as history, L2 learners follow their own non-linear trajectory towards communicative competence. So as a history teacher, you can boldly ask your class to memorize certain dates and historical events related to those dates. Some students will learn the facts easily while others will struggle a bit but at the end of the day, you can expect all of them to answer your questions correctly on a test. We English teachers, on the other hand, have wondered too many times before why on earth Student X still does not know when and how to use the present perfect tense even though we have ‚taught‘ it on so many occasions. Well, this is how it works. Some crops ripen later than others, which doesn’t make them worse or deficient in any way. You just have to be patient. It will happen in the end; you just don’t know when exactly.

So, have I or have I not answered the question in the title of this post? And is this a display or referential question? Well, yes and no. And it can be both, I think. 😉

References
Alali, F. and Schmitt, N. (2012). Teaching formulaic sequences: The same or different from teaching single words? TESOL Journal 3, 2: 153-180.