Unit 17

Practice activities and tasks for language and skills development

One of the most significant aspects that the teachers must recognize or get familiar is to know what are practice activities and tasks for language and skills development?  In fact they are designed to give learners opportunities to practice the language through the use the new vocabulary, functional exponents or grammatical structures, or of the subskills of reading.

Let’s tackle controlled activities give students repeated practice in accuracy and the forms of language which allow students to make few mistakes through the use copying words, jazz chants ad drills. Meanwhile free activities, allow students to use whatever language they wish in order to complete a task, however teachers need to take into account that they cannot use these activities to give practice in specific language. Finally, freer activities in which teachers can predict to some extent what language the students will need to use by applying role plays information-gap activities, gap-fills, surveys.

As conclusion, teachers really need to use several kinds of activities in their lessons add variety since it helps to keep lessons more interesting and motivating. 

Here you have some links which contain useful information:

http://www.cambridgetkt.com/tkt-module-1/background-to-language-teaching/practice-activities-and-tasks-for-language-and-skills-development/