Typology of communicative language activities

2.1 Types of communicative activities and their arrangement

Different scholars define some different types of communicative activities. D. Gross states, that there are three general types of communicative activities: informal learning groups, formal learning groups, and study teams [26; 483].

Informal learning groups are ad hoc temporary clusterings of students within a single class session. Informal learning groups can be initiated, for example, by asking students to turn to a neighbor and spend two minutes discussing a question you have posed. You can also form groups of three to five to solve a problem or pose a question. You can organize informal groups at any time in a class of any size to check on students' understanding of the material, to give students an opportunity to apply what they are learning, or to provide a change of pace.

Formal learning groups are teams established to complete a specific task, such as perform a lab experiment, write a report, carry out a project, or prepare a position paper. These groups may complete their work in a single class session or over several weeks. Typically, students work together until the task is finished, and their project is graded.

Study teams are long-term groups (usually existing over the course of a semester) with stable membership whose primary responsibility is to provide members with support, encouragement, and assistance in completing course requirements and assignments. Study teams also inform their members about lectures and assignments when someone has missed a session. The larger the class and the more complex the subject matter, the more valuable study teams can be.

Paul Nation have developed types of arrangement of communicative activities. He assumes that a useful way of classifying arrangement of these activities is to look at the distribution of the information needed to do the activity. In many activities learners have equal access to the same material or information and cooperate to do the task. Thus, P. Nation lists them:

- the cooperating arrangement where learners have equal access to the same material or information and cooperate to do the task,

- the superior-interior arrangement whereone member of the group has information that all the others need,

- the combining arrangement where each learner has a different piece of information that all the others need,

- the individual arrangement where each learner has access to the same information but must perform or deal with a different part of it [27; 167].

These four different types of communicative activities achieve different learning goals, they are best suited to different kinds of tasks, require different kinds of seating arrangement, and draw on or encourage different kinds of social relationships. In order for group work to be successful, each type of group work must have its most suitable choice of other factors.

Let us now look at each type in turn to see how the principle of communicative work applies and arranged.

The combining arrangement is the ideal arrangement for communicative work because it ensures interest and participation. It may be noticed that ways of making other arrangements more effective often involve adding an element of combining. The essential feature of a combining arrangement is that each learner has unique, essential information. This means that each learner has a piece of information that the others do not have, and each piece of information is needed to complete the task. Here is an example involving a group of three learners: Each learner has a map of an island. However, on one learner's map only some of the towns are named and only some of the roads are indicated. On the second learner's map some of the other towns are named, the railway system is given, and the airport is shown. On the third learner's map the remaining roads and-towns are shown, the central mountain is named, and the forest is indicated. Each learner's map is therefore incomplete, and each learner has information that the other two do not have. By combining this information each learner can make a complete map. They do this by keeping their map hidden from the others and by describing what is on their map for the others to draw on theirs.

The best seating arrangement of the members of the group during this activity supports the essential features of the arrangement. Each learner needs to have equal access to the others to get the essential information while preserving the uniqueness of their own information. This means that when working in pairs the learners should face each other, because that allows good communication while hiding their written or pictorial information. When working in a group, it is best if the learners sit in a circle, so that each learner is an equal distance from any other learner. Equal access to each other is the most important element in the seating arrangement of combining-arrangement groups.

The social relationship amongst the members of a combining group needs to be one of equality. For this reason it is usually unwise for the teacher to become a member of a group unless the learners are prepared to treat the teacher as an equal and the teacher is willing to take a non-dominant role. Some teachers find this difficult to do. In addition, various status relationships among learners may upset the activity. Research by Philips with the Warm Springs Indians found that the way in which the local community's group activities were organized had a strong effect on learners' participation in classroom activities [28; 370]. Just as social relationships can affect the group activity, participation in the group activity can have effects on the social relationships of learners. Aronson et al. found that working in combining arrangements increased the liking that members of the group had for each other, and resulted in a relationship of equality [29; 43].

Research on the combining arrangement as a means of achieving learning goals has focused on acquiring language through negotiating comprehensible input and mastering content. Long and Porter call combining-arrangement activities "two-way tasks" to distinguish them from superior-inferior activities ("one-way tasks”). This research indicates a superiority for combining arrangement activities over teacher-fronted activities and "one-way tasks" [30; 208].

The most suitable tasks for combining-arrangement group work include:

1.completion, e. g., completing a picture by exchanging information, completing a story by pooling ideas;

2. providing directions, e. g., describing a picture for someone to draw, telling someone how to make something;

3. matching, classifying, distinguishing, e. g., deciding if your partner's drawing is the same as yours, arranging pictures in the same order as your partner's unseen pictures;

4. ordering, e. g., putting the sentences or pictures of a story in order.

Combining-arrangement activities do not usually present problems for the teacher. Group size is not a restricting factor. Strip-story exercises involving the ordering of pictures or sentences can be done with groups of 15 or more as long as learners can sit in a large circle or move about to have easy access to each other. One difficulty that may occur is maintaining the uniqueness of each learner's information. This can be done by getting learners to memorize their information at the beginning of the task, or, in pair work, setting up a physical barrier between learners. This physical barrier may be a cardboard screen about 30 centimeters high.

Should combining groups be made up of learners with mixed proficiency or with roughly similar proficiency? In assessing the spread of participation in the activity, P. Nation found that learners in a homogeneous, low-proficiency group had more equal spoken participation than learners in mixed groups [27; 89]. Johnson, D. W. found that most negotiation of meaning occurred when learners were of different language backgrounds and of different proficiency levels. Clearly, different goals will require different group membership [31; 49].

The cooperating arrangement is the most common kind of group work. Its essential feature is that all learners have equal access to the same information and have equal access to each other's view of it. This is because the purpose of a cooperating activity is for learners to share their understanding of the solutions to the task or of the material involved. Here is an example:

The learners are shown a picture and have several questions to answer about it, such as: If you had to write a one-word title for this picture, what would it be? What happened before the event in this picture? What are the characters' feelings towards each other? The learners discuss their answers to the questions.

The best seating arrangement for the members of the group is to sit in a horseshoe with the material in the open end of the horseshoe, or in a circle if there is no material to look at. Similarly, in a pair the learners should sit facing the same direction with the material in front of them. As much as possible, all the learners in a group should be the same distance from the material and the same distance from each other. If the information is a text or a picture, then it is best not to give each learner a copy, because this would encourage individual rather than cooperative activity.

Cooperating requires some degree of equality between learners, particularly a rough equality of skill. Research shows that group performance is often inferior to the best individual's performance if there is an exceptional individual in the group. Thus, for cooperating activities it is best to put exceptional learners in one group rather than to spread them across groups. The considerable amount of research on cooperating activities with native speakers shows the good effects that such work has on improving social relationships among learners, including learners from different ethnic backgrounds. The most suitable tasks for cooperating-arrangement group work include:

1. ranking, ordering, choosing, e. g., choosing the best candidate for a job, ranking a list of items needed for survival or a list of actions open to you;

2. finding implications, causes, or uses, e. g., brainstorming the uses of a paper clip on a desert island, interpreting a picture;

3. solving problems, e. g., answeringletters, solving logical puzzles, simulations;

4. producing material, e. g., making a radio program, preparing for a debate or play.

The major problem with cooperating arrangements is encouraging each learner to play an active part in the group. Because all learners have equal access to the same information, no individual is essential to the activity as occurs in the combining arrangement. Various stratagems have been used to deal with nonparticipation. One way is to introduce elements of the combining arrangement by giving each learner in the group a different job to do. For example, one acts as the secretary to keep a record of decisions. One has the job of encouraging each learner to offer an opinion. One controls the various steps in the discussion procedure. Another way is to have a reward structure that gives the group responsibility for each individual's learning by rewarding the winning group rather than any individual in the group. A third way to deal with non-participation is to change group size or the people in the groups to provide the optimum climate in each group for participation to occur.

The superior-inferior arrangement in group work is a parallel to traditional class teaching. The essential feature of the arrangement is that one or more learners have all the information that the others in the group need. Here are two examples.

One learner has a complete text. The other learners have some important words from the text. By asking yes/no questions using those words as clues, the learners try to reconstruct the text.

One learner has a dictation text that she dictates to the others in the group. They write the dictation.

The best seating arrangement of the members of the group is with the person in the superior position facing the others. All the others should be an equal distance from the person with the information. Notice that this arrangement has parallels with the combining arrangement. The combining arrangement may be viewed as a set of superior-inferior arrangements with every learner in the group having the chance to be in the superior position-that is, having information that others need and do not have.

The social relationship amongst the members of a superior-inferior group is one of inequality. The person with the information is in asuperior position. This person may gain status from being in this position or may need to be a person with such status.

Research on peer teaching with native speakers shows that the superior-inferior arrangement can result in a lot of useful learning, particularly in pair work.

The most suitable tasks for superior-inferior group work include:

1. data gathering, e. g., interviews, questioning;

2. providing directions, e. g., telling how to get to a place on the map, providing instructions about how to arrange parts to make a complete item;

3.completion.

The individual arrangement of the group-work means that each learner has the same information but must perform individually with a part of that information. The Say It! Exercise is a good example of this:

All the learners in a group can see a grid:

Each section of the grid has a different task. The learners take turns to name a section of the grid, e. g., B l, and the next learner in the group has to carry out the task. The exercise is based on an article called "The World of a Tree”. The learners would read it before doing the exercise.

Unlike the superior-inferior arrangement and combining arrangement, no learner has information that the others do not have. Unlike the cooperating arrangement, each learner makes an individual performance which is not necessarily helped by the others in the group. The major effects of the individual arrangement are to increase the time each learner can spend on a task, and to ensure that each learner participates.

The learners in the group need to have equal access to the material and be in sight of each other. Sitting in a circle is usually the most convenient.

The most suitable tasks for the individual arrangement in group work include:

1. solving problems, e. g., role play activities where each individual must perform in a certain way;

2. repetition, e. g., a chain story where learners retell the story to each other and see the changes that occur in retelling;

3.completion, e. g., each learner has to add a part to complete a story.

Group work like any other class activity, can quickly become a routine. Once students are used to it and have regular working partners, it can be organized quickly and easily (by saying "Now get into your groups”). The first new times that teachers try to make group work are very important - they need to give more careful instructions and know exactly how they will divide the class.

Language teaching practices were developed in organizing class into groups. Some types of class dividing are shown in the picture (see Appendix B, pic.1).

Thus, we can state that types of group work are: formal learning groups, informal learning groups, study teams.

Types of group work arrangement are: the cooperating arrangement, the superior-interior arrangement, the combining arrangement and the individual arrangement.

Date: 2016-02-19; view: 855; Нарушение авторских прав