Buckland Weekly #20 - What Makes a Good Activity?

There are all sorts of things you can do in your lessons and some activities work better than others. What exactly makes a good activity? Well, before you can answer it you need to keep a few things in mind:

you are working in a class that could contain eighty students;

your job is to teach “oral English” - writing, reading and grammar are incidental;

the class may have very mixed levels.

So keeping that in mind, what's the answer?

Let's start with a list and then consider it point by point.

• Involves whole class
• clear instructions/ demonstration
• has a point and a completion
• relevant to study
• appropriate for age and level
• reviewed at end
• not too complicated or too simple
• not too vague
• can be done by both weak and strong students
• achievable
• timed
• new

Involves the whole class.

This can be difficult to achieve with such large classes. I have observed teachers who have got it spectacularly wrong. If your lesson is, for example, about food, you can certainly elicit from a few students the answer to “What is your favourite food?” as a starting point for the lesson but if you ask all eighty students the same question not only will it waste half of your lesson but most of the students are doing nothing at all for most of the time. What has been a forty minute lesson from your point of view has been a thirty second lesson from any individual students point of view.

The way round this is to divide the class into groups and then make sure each group is getting a chance to participate in the activity – as well as designing your activity so that everyone in the group can do something.

Clear Instructions and Demonstration

This was discussed in the last post but bears repeating. Make your instructions as simple as possible. Write them as well as speaking them and if at all possible demonstrate the activity as well as describing it. Get a couple of the strongest students to come out and demonstrate or demonstrate with one of the students yourself.

Has A Point and A Completion

I don't like poorly defined open ended activities. Let me give an example. Imagine your lesson is about shopping and you have done some kind of warm up and introduced the sentences and vocabulary needed and you are no ready to get them producing the language. Putting them in pairs and saying “one of you is a shopkeeper and one of you is a customer, practice buying and selling”. is a terrible activity. There isn't a specific point to it and they have no way of knowing when they have finished. Instead, set it up this way, Put them in groups of six and making three shopkeepers and three customers. Then giving each customer an amount of money and a (different) shopping list and each shopkeeper a (different) list of stock and prices. tell them that the customers must buy everything as cheaply as possible and the shopkeepers must sell as much as possible. Now the activity has been specifically defined and it has an end point – when every customer has bought everything on his or her list.

Relevant To Study/ Appropriate for Age and Level

Think about your class. Back in England I taught adult asylum seekers who needed topics such as how to speak to their lawyer or doctor. Those would be irrelevant in my Chinese classes. Use topics and activities that relate to the lives of your students.

Reviewed At End

You should always try to include a review phase in your activities. This can be done as you are walking round but I prefer to always ask a few review questions at the end. I review as I monitor but I also always keep in mind which groups have done especially well on the task and then ask them some questions from the front so that the whole class can hear the modelled answers. For example in the shopping task mentioned above I might ask the customers how much they paid for a particular item or the shopkeepers how much money they made.

Not Too Complicated or Too Simple

This doesn't just mean that every student can do it. It's more that an activity that is too simple won't engage the students and one that is too hard will initially engage them but might come to bore them as they find it too complicated to complete. I enjoy doing cryptic crosswords but not when they are so easy I can dash them off in ten minutes or so hard that I can't even get started with a single clue.

Not Too Vague

This is really just a repeat of the point about activities having a point and a completion. I have sometimes seen teachers give the instruction “Now just talk about...” which is about as vague as you can get and still BE an instruction. Remember students need to know fairly specifically what they are to do. It's unreasonable to expect them to work from such vague guidance.

Can Be Done By Both Weak And Strong Students

This can actually be rather tricky as your classes will almost always be of very mixed levels. I try, especially in discussion tasks, to make my tasks doable by people working at their own level. Sometimes I have a simpler and a harder version of the task but this inevitable seems to lead to the problem of everyone wanting to try the harder version even when they clearly won't be able t do it.

Achievable and Timed

These were both discussed in the last post – just make sure that any activity can actually be done and set a time limit for each one.

New

This has been suggested to me at various times and while I think it's good to keep activities fresh it's also good to re-use activities that the students enjoy. By all means try to put a fresh spin on things but don't be afraid of using crowd-pleasing favourites... just don't repeat exactly the same ones every week.