LANGUAGE ACTIVITIES IN THE ESL CLASSROOM
ESL classroom activities are usually categorized into those which promote listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For children who have not mastered the Roman alphabet, such as Japanese ones, writing's initial activity is the learning of this alphabet. For these Japanese children, this is the first steep hurdle, not because the graphic symbols look "funny", but because they are used so differently from those of Japanese. The obstacle is conceptual and cultural rather than technical. Until recently, most schools taught the traditional four skills separately and in the audio-lingual sequence of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Perhaps calligraphy ought to be added as a fifth skill for people who do not use the Roman alphabet in their own language. With the current stress on holistic and communicative approaches to teaching/learning ESL/EFL, has come the teaching/learning of all skills simultaneously, in the belief that they reinforce each other and that they should be viewed holistically as the normal means of social communication. Communication is a holistic activity: the word cannot be decontextualized.
Today, the emphasis is on learning to communicate through meaningful interaction in the target language, the use of authentic material, the provision of opportunities for learners to focus on the learning process as well as on language, the enhancement of the learner's personal experience, and an attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the classroom (Nunan, 1993, p. 52).
Task-based language teaching (TBLT) has influenced syllabus design, materials development, and methodology. Four steps are usually followed in the development of pedagogic tasks (learning-activities), viz.
1) Identify the target task (to give learners the opportunity to develop language skills relevant to their real world needs).
2) Provide models (to provide l...