Let’s be celebrations!
The purpose of this activity is that students are able to exchange information between them successfully. To achieve this, we will use and Information Gap Activity (from Communicative language teaching) in a second year high school class. The topic chosen comes from unit 6, traditions, traditions, from the respective textbook “Looking Ahead” given by the government. The objective is that students collect information about one celebration from each month of the year.
The activity starts with the instructions of the teacher. Each student is given an empty calendar with twelve empty blanks corresponding to each month of the year. Besides, each student is given with a piece of paper that contains information about one specific celebration and its main characteristics (Ex: July 4th, US. Key words: Independence, Freedom, New Nation, George Washington.) The idea is that every student completes his/her calendar with the information that received from its classmates WITHOUT RECEIVING THE EXACT NAME – as most of the celebrations have been seen in class and they know about them, just need some key words. (Ex: X is July the 4th. It’s the United States Independence Day.) This activity also promotes the uses of grammar in the correct form of question and answer with present perfect and present perfect continuous corresponding to the unit.
The materials needed are the empty calendars and the papers containing the information about celebration for each student (celebrations can be repeated if the number of students is too big).
Which is clear after this activity is that Gap information would be an instance for students to practice their skills of speaking in giving and asking for specific information. Besides, the purpose of all this activities related to CLT is to reach a common goal as a group.
Information gap activity