Chapter 6: Holding the Reins and Letting Them Loose – Giving Students Practice 93
Practising in groups
You can use larger groups of students or the whole class again for the
Practice stage. Sometimes it’s fun to have a competitive element or just the
camaraderie of working side by side.Here are a couple of ideas:✓ Using a blindfold: One student in a group covers her eyes and then has
to listen to the directions of her classmates in order to find a particular
location of an object.
✓ Running dictations: Organise two teams and two copies of a written text
full of the target language for the lesson. You place the texts at one end
of the room while the students remain at the other end. Each team has a
blank sheet of paper and a pen. One by one, students come up and look
at the text. They each memorise a chunk of the text, as much as they can
manage, and reproduce it on the blank sheet. By the end of the activity
the teams should have their own handwritten versions of the text. They
practise accuracy and remembering chunks of language.
Moving to the Production Stage
In this third stage of the lesson, called Production or Freer Practice, the focus
is on fluency. Students have a chance to experiment a bit and add the new
language to everything else they know by, for example, having extended dis-
cussions, describing things in detail and telling stories. The aim is to set the
students a task that gets them speaking, or writing, in their own words but
that’s a suitable context for including the target language. Having concen-
trated on being accurate in the Practice stage, students can now try to sound
natural when they incorporate the new language.The Production stage tests the students subtly. They should be able to show
off what they can do without you holding their hands or guiding them.A Production activity involves speaking or writing primarily and encourages
creativity.Writing and speaking
Writing activities are usually solitary affairs. It’s pretty straight forward to set
students an essay task, for example, and ask them to include particular words
or phrases. If you do this, you should have some involvement in planning the
written piece with the students so that they have sufficient structure. Use the