Teaching Tips

2. 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:

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  the cooperating arrangement where learners have equal access to the same material or information and cooperate to do the task,
  
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  the superior-interior arrangement where one member of the group has information that all the others need,
  
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  the combining arrangement where each learner has a different piece of information that all the others need,
  
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  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].