Webinar Recording Webinar Presentation Webinar Handout

The communicative approach is based on the idea that learning language successfully comes through having to communicate real meaning. If students are to learn to use real language when communicating, they need to be exposed to real language too.

The critical thing is to understand the concept of a language “task”. It’s easiest if you first think of a situation and then think of the kinds of communication that take place in that situation. For example, think of the many situations in which you find yourself over a given day: speaking to family members over breakfast, getting gas for the car on the way to work, listening to the radio on the drive, greeting co-workers on the way into the building after stopping to purchase a newspaper, writing a quick email to remind someone of something, making a doctor’s appointment, etc. The list goes on and on.

Each one of these situations involves speaking, listening, reading or writing tasks. If you begin to think about language tasks before you think about the more traditional ways of sequencing language learning (by grammar or vocabulary, for example), you will be more likely to design communicative lessons and activities.

Task-based teaching is not F2F option only. Your learners can complete language tasks online: before your class, after your class or even in class. There is a number of  Web 2.0 tools that enable you to have an online meeting room to create webinars, giving tutoring, having discussions, forums, collaboration projects and sharing files and information in real time.

One of them is Vyew.com. Feel free to visit our Vyew room created for the webinar and have a look at (or even complete) some activities we have there.