Tag Archives: communicative

Communicative Activities for Spanish, French & More

You know the feeling. You’ve just wrapped up a fast-paced, high-energy class. Students were laughing, moving around, working in teams. Maybe they were playing a game, doing a relay, or solving a challenge. You felt the energy. You saw the excitement.

But then you pause and wonder: Did they actually communicate in the target language? Were they practicing meaningful communication in Spanish, French, or any other language or just doing whatever it took to win the game?

If you’ve ever asked yourself that, you’re asking the right question. Because yes… fun matters. Joy matters. Engagement matters. But in the world language classroom, communication is the ultimate goal.

Participation Isn’t Always Communication

Just because students are participating doesn’t mean they’re communicating. But, with just a few tweaks, your favorite activities can become truly communicative and drive proficiency growth. You don’t need to ditch your go-to games. You don’t need to make everything serious or formal. But you do need to ask: Does this activity give students a reason to use the language with purpose? It’s not just about keeping students busy and on task, but guiding them to use the language meaningfully.

How do we do this?

Add Purpose and Personalization

Let’s take a classic: Find Someone Who. Traditionally, students walk around asking questions like:

¿Tienes una mascota? (Do you have a pet?)
Aimes-tu le chocolat? (Do you like chocolate?)

It’s interactive and it’s fun, but without a follow-up, it can slide into box-checking.

Here’s the tweak:

During: Students still ask and record answers.
After: Students choose two classmates and create a short written or spoken summary:
- Aprendí que Mateo tiene dos perros y los pasea todas las mañanas. Ana no tiene mascota pero quiere un gato.
- J’ai appris que Camille adore le théâtre et qu’elle y va tous les mois. Lucas n’y va jamais, mais il regarde beaucoup de films.
After: Comparisons
- Mateo and I both have pets, but Ana doesn’t.
- Camille et moi aimons le théâtre, mais Lucas préfère le cinéma.

Now you’ve got interpersonal communication (asking, answering) feeding into presentational communication (summarizing, comparing) and the game has a clear linguistic goal.

Use the “Does It Build Proficiency?” Checklist

Before launching any activity, ask yourself these 4 questions:

Are students using the target language to express meaning?
Is there a real-world connection or purpose?
Are students interpreting, negotiating, or producing language?
Will this support what they’ll do on an upcoming assessment?

If you answer “yes” to three or four you’re in great shape. If not, there’s and easy fix.

Small tweaks that help:

Add a real-world hook (“Find someone who celebrates a holiday in March—then compare it to your own.”)
Provide scaffolded sentence frames.
Include a reflection piece at the end.

Your Turn

This week, take one activity you alike and fo through the checklist above. Is you answer no to any of the questions:

Add a purpose.
Add a personal connection.
Create space for negotiation of meaning..

Go Further

If you want a clear framework for making any activity communicative, my Ready for Tomorrow Quick Win PD course: Design Activities That Are Fun and Communicative will walk you through it.

In just 30 minutes (and only $10), you’ll learn how to:

Identify the characteristics of communicative tasks.
Distinguish between engaging vs. truly communicative.
Evaluate and adapt existing activities.
Design activities with meaningful language use at the center.
Create tasks that promote interpretation, interaction, and expression.

What your $10 gets you:

An audio walkthrough—listen anywhere
A note sheet to guide your thinking
Examples for novice, intermediate, and advanced classes
A reusable planning template
A PD certificate to document your hours

You can get the individual course or the Quick Win PD Growing Bundle, which gives you all 10 current courses plus all future ones.

Click Here to Get Started

Design Communicative Activities in the Foreign Language Classroom (SlideShare)

Posted on | Leave a comment

Take a look at this SlideShare with tips and suggestion for creating effective communicative activities in the foreign language classroom.

Design Communicative Activities in the Foreign Language Classroom

Posted on | 2 comments

There are six ACTFL Core Practices that serve as guide for teachers as they teach toward increased foreign language proficiency in their classrooms. One of the key core practices is designing communicative activities for students.

The wave of communicative language teaching began several years back when the language teaching community (linguists, teachers and students alike) took a hard look at the “best” practices of language teachers and came to the conclusion that these practices were not leading students toward being able to use the target language. Much of the language teaching that was happening several decades back was focused on what students knew about the target language (i.e. verb conjugations, adjective forms, pronoun placement) and not what they were able to accomplish or do with the language that they were learning. When it became clear that students were not able to communicate effectively using the target language it was clear that we needed to modify how we teach languages. This was the birth of the concept of communicative language teaching. Essentially it is an attempt to guide students toward an increased ability to communicate.

What is a Communicative Activity?

There are three concepts of communicative language teaching that set it apart form more traditional approaches:

The focus is on communicating and doing something with the language as opposed to practicing isolated language features out of context.
It is student-centered as opposed to teacher-centered. Students create with language rather than having the language explained to them.
The approach is focused on understanding the message being conveyed by students despite inaccuracy in language form as opposed to being focused on correct usage of language structures and only secondarily tending to the message.

Tips for Designing Communicative Activities

Here are a few tips and ideas to keep in mind as we design communicative activities. Remember, communicative language teaching, or teaching that will guide students toward confidently communicating in the target language, is focused on the message, not practicing language structures out of context.

Activate background knowledge (pre-speaking activities) on the topic of the activity and/or choose a topic with which students are familiar. When the focus is on communicating and building confidence we want students to be comfortable with the topic. If they have the language proficiency, but lack content knowledge they will not communicate as much as they would if they were more familiar with the topic.
Use open-ended prompts and questions when designing an activity or task. Prompts that are more finite will not allow for opportunities to engage with the topic and negotiate meaning.
Design prompts that require that pairs or groups of students must rely on and listen to each other. If the prompt requires sharing an opinion, but not finding a commonality or difference with their speaking partner the task is more presentational in nature.
Create questions and prompts that require pairs and groups to collaborate and use the language to arrive at a product, not necessarily something physical that they will produce, but more finding a collaborative solution.
Be sure that the tasks students complete are at their proficiency level. Know what their level is and the text type (lists, chunked phrases, discrete sentences, connected sentences, paragraph). Design a task that will require creating with language using these text types. A prompt for intermediate low students that requires speaking in connected sentences will lead to a communication breakdown because the text type for their proficiency level is single, discrete sentences.

Is the Activity Communicative?

Of the three modes of communication (interpersonal, interpretive, presentational) communicative language teaching lends itself best to interpersonal communication. This mode is about active, real-time exchange of ideas and messages in a two-way (rather than one-way) exchange. Often when teachers create activities that appear interpersonal they are actually more presentational. Here are some questions to keep in mind to make sure that the activity that you are designing is actually interpersonal:

Is the activity student-centered, rather than teacher-centered?
Is the language spontaneous and unrehearsed, rather than prepared and practiced in advance?
Is the focus on conveying and understanding the message, rather than on correct language forms?
Is the communication a two-way exchange, rather than one-way, requiring response, reaction and spontaneous follow-up?
Do students have opportunities to negotiate meaning if they don’t fully understand, rather than understanding all vocabulary and language structures?
Do students have communication strategies that they can employ (language ladders, functional chunks, circumlocution)?

Examples of Communicative Activities

Here are few examples of activity structures that, regardless of proficiency level or content, take into account the concepts of communicative language teaching outlined above: