FINAL TASK: Units 3 & 4

 Design a Communicative Language Teaching Task for Primary Education inclufing the initial (pre-communication & communication) activities or pedagogical & enabling tasks students will carry out to complete the final CLT task.

 DONE BY: Ana Gonzalo Díaz and Andrea García Briones

To create our CLT task we needed to have present a context of key ideas to have a framework base where to begin imagine and structuring the task:

• FRAMEWROK:

- CLT: Communicative language teaching can be understood as a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom.’ .

- CLT Classroom activities and roles:

• Movement away from traditional lessons. 

• Pairwork, role plays, groupwork. 

• Teacher’s role: Facilitator and monitor. 

• Learners’ role: Participate, collaborate, listen to their peers and take responsibility.

- Four skills →  achieve "communicative competence" (rather than linguistic competence) through considerable learner interaction and communication of "real" meaning.

• OUR DESIGNED TASK:

- Settings data:

1. Age and level of students: 10/11 years old students, A2/B1 English Level.

2. School / Group: Bilingual public school, 5th course of Primary.

3. Number of students: 25
4. Classification of activities: Littlewood (1981) classification.

- Materials and resources: Storytelling dices, blank worksheets, pencils and pens.

- Developed task: 

The task we have decided to do include the four language skills so it becomes a appropiate CLT Task. To work all of them in the same task, our common thread would be stories. An story is something you can read in silence (reading), out loud (speaking), you can listen to it (listening) or you can create (writting).

Firstly, at the beggining of the class, once the students came into, we would told them today they are a group of literary authors. If we have introduce this topic before, we can let them choose a specific one so they feel more represented and integrated with the activity, if not, they can pretend their own names were famous on the literature history or they can choose the name of the author of the last book they had had read, as an engaging way to make them feel more motivated with the task. If we do these as a brainstorming of classical authors from literature, it would be an introductory activity for the task. If we do it as a debate and consensus (as we exposed firstly) it would be a Structural Acitvity.

Once they are characterized the whole group will be divided in small groups of 5; every student at the group would have a different roles so the activity can be more organized. The roles would be assigned by the teacher, according to every students personality, so we can assure the best performance of the group:

• Controller: Is the one in charge of overviewing the project that they are doing. He/she must supervise the group mates who are doing their work assigned and that the work itself is developing correctly.

• Secretary: His/her objective must be to take notes about doubts of the group, problems they are facing, etc. It can also be a helper for the controller. 

• Coordinator: He/she is the agent of the group, he/she acts in the name of the whole group as well as is in charge of organizate how the group will work and to check they are doing right.

• Spokesman: For this role, the student has the power to communicate with the teacher to ask for doubts or help. Is the voice of the whole group.

• Assistant: As the secretary, is in charged of overviewing how the work is being done, and also, can be the substitute of the coordinator if needed. His objective is to control the time so the final work is presented on time.

The next activity they will do is a Functional-Communication Activitie. Once they are reunited in groups in their assigned table, we would give them story cubes. Their objective is to throw them and with the pictures that appear, they would have to write a story, in which the only rule is that in it there has to be five characters.

In the moment they have thrown all the dices (or any time some throws one, there are no limits on how many times they have to throw them, that is a group choice) there must be a brainstorming in the group, organized by the roles every student have, and later on, deciding what the story is going to be about.

Then, they have to start writing their story. At the same time, the teacher will be around and helping with doubts about the structure, grammar, vocabulary, etc, if is needed. The groups are in charged (spokesman, specifically) to ask about what they can not resolve by themselves, the teacher would not correct if is not asked to. To help and promote this independency of working, every group would have dictionaries for questions and queries.

When they have finished, we will start the next activity from this task, the Social Interaction Activity., an improvisation drama play. For this activity the teacher will takes every story and distributes them randomly to the groups, so after writting, all the groups would have a new story written by other clasmates group. Therefore, to start the activity the groups would have to decide the role they are going to play in the story, sciliet, they would have to read the story in small groups and every participant would have to choose a character from it to interpretated in the small drama play/roleplaying they are going to do. Once they have decided, and have a general idea of the story some volunteers or every group (depending on the time) would go to the center of the class and recreate the story in their own way.

At last, to finish the lesson, there would be a general assembly where every group, working with their roles, would give a feedback from other plays. To help them and to promote the debate, the teacher will be asking questions like:

- Who was your favourite character?

- What part did you enjoy the most? 

- Which was your favourite group representation? Why?

As a conclussion, the role of the teacher is monitor and facilitator, while the role of students is very active; with participation, collaboration, cooperative group works, etc.

Doing this activity we are doing social-interaction activities and also functional-communication, while they are practising grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation… They are working in the 4 skills (listening, writing, reading and speaking). We found a very complete and interesting idea for a task that would give students a creativity space while they are practising all the language skills they have and learning more during the march by their classmates and no with theorical lessons.