Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Techniques of communicative teaching
The archetypal communicative technique is an information gap exercise.
Touchstone (McCarthy et al., 2005) uses cartoon maps of two imaginary neighbour-
hoods; students have to find the differences. Living with People (Cook, 1983) used
pairs of photographs of Oxford street scenes with slight differences – a butcher’s
shop taken from two different angles, a queue at a bus stop taken a few seconds
apart, and so on. Students look at one or other set of photos and have to discover
what the differences are, if any, by talking to each other without looking at the
other set. This information gap technique originated with language expansion
exercises for native English primary school children in the 1970s, in courses such
as Concept 7–9 (Wight et al., 1972), but it soon became a mainstay of EFL teaching.
It might use visuals, tapes or models – in fact, anything where the teacher could
Second language learning and language teaching styles
248

---

deliberately engineer two sets of slightly differing information so that the students
had an information gap to bridge. The point of the activity is that the students
have to improvise the dialogue themselves to solve their communicative task.
They have to use their own resources to achieve a communicative goal with other
people, thus bringing communication directly into the classroom.
The second standard communicative technique is guided role play. The stu-
dents improvise conversations around an issue without the same contrived infor-
mation gap. New Cutting Edge (Cunningham et al., 2005), for example, suggests: ‘Act
out a conversation in the tourist information office’. One student role-plays an offi-
cial, the other their normal character. The aim is practising how to assume partic-
ular roles in situations. The situations themselves are virtually the same as those
in the audio-lingual method – the doctor’s, the station, the restaurant – but
instead of starting from the highly controlled, pre-set dialogues of the audio-lin-
gual method, students try to satisfy communicative needs by talking for them-
selves; it is not the language of the station that is important, it is what you do with
it – buying a ticket, asking for the time of a train, and so on.
The third general technique is tasks: students carry out tasks in the classroom
with a definite outcome. For instance, in Lesson 14 of Atlas 1 (Nunan, 1995), stu-
dents go through a linked series of tasks on ‘giving reasons’, called a ‘task chain’.
First they listen to a taped conversation and have to tick how many times they hear
‘why’ and ‘because’; then they listen again to find out specific reasons; in pairs,
they compare their answers, and after the teacher has given a ‘model’ conversa-
tion, they role-play equivalent conversations about ‘asking for things and giving
reasons’. Finally, they discuss in groups whether it is appropriate to ask other peo-
ple to do things like ‘buy you a drink’ in their own cultures. Students are working
together to achieve the task and to share their conclusions with other students:
the picture that accompanies this task chain is two smiling students talking to
each other, highlighting the classroom-internal nature of the task.
In one sense, these three techniques cover the same ground. The information
gap game merges with the role play when the person playing the ticket collector
has information the other students do not; the task becomes a role play when they
practise fictional requests.
The communicative classroom is a very different place from classrooms using
the other two styles encountered so far. The teacher no longer dominates it, con-
trolling and guiding the students every minute. Rather the teacher takes one step
back and hands the responsibility for the activities over to the students, forcing
them to make up their own conversations in pairs and groups – learning language
by doing. A key difference from other styles is that the students are not required
to produce speech with the minimum of mistakes in native terms. Instead, they
can use whatever forms and strategies they can devise themselves to solve their
communication problem, producing sentences that may be entirely appropriate
to their task but are often highly deviant from a native perspective. The teacher
stands by. While the teacher provides some feedback and correction, this plays a
much less central part in his or her classroom duties. The teacher has the role of
equal and helper rather than the wise expert of the academic style or the martinet
of the audio-lingual.
This jump from the traditional teacher-led class disconcerts or indeed alienates
those from cultures who see education differently. The adoption of the commu-
nicative style in a particular place always has to recognize this potential cultural
obstacle, however ideal communicative language teaching may be on other
The communicative style 249

---

grounds. Here is a conversation taking place at a parents’ evening featuring an
Inuk parent and a non-Inuit teacher (Crago, 1992):
Teacher: Your son is talking well in class. He is speaking up a lot.
Inuk parent: I am very sorry.
To the teacher, it is obvious that it is a virtue to speak and contribute in class; to
the parent, it is equally obviously that children who show proper respect for the
teacher stay silent in class. A communicative style with its emphasis on sponta-
neous production by the learners is unlikely to go down well in cultures that value
silence and respect.