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2.2 Features of the Activity Approach
In this part, the features of the activity approach is talked, mainly emphasizing on its validity, volume, and success-orientation.
The activity should activate learners primarily in the skill or material and its purports to practice. This is an evident principle that is surprisingly often violated. Many speaking activities are designed to make learners listen to the teacher more than speak by themselves. Note that validity does not necessarily hint that language should be used for some kind of replication of real-life communication. For instance, pronunciation drills and vocabulary practice may also be valid if they in fact serve primarily to rehearse and improve the items to be practiced.
Generally speaking, the more language the learners actually engage with during the activity, the more practice they will take. If the time is available for the activity, then teaching should be filled with as much volume of language as possible.
On the whole, we consolidate learning by doing things right. It is therefore crucial to select, design and administer practice activities in such a way that learners are likely to succeed in doing the task. Success, incidentally, does not mean perfection. A class may engage successfully with language practice in groups, where mistakes do occasionally occur, but most of the utterances are acceptable and a large volume of practice is achieved. This is often preferable to teacher-monitored full-class practice, which may produce fully accurate responses but at the expense of volume and opportunities for active participation by most of the class.
2.3 Application of Activity Approach in Primary English Teaching
The New Curriculum targets stress the importance of pupils’ interests, confidence, and participation. In order to build up pupils’ interest in learning English, especially understanding of the text, some English teachers told them to make a performance according to the text they have learned before. After class, they had to make a full preparation for it. Not only did they make-up dialogues but also they kept them in their minds. In this case, the text became simple. If in the next class they would do a performance, pupils usually made a proper setting before class for the purpose that they had enough space to show their performances. They even recorded the warning sounds and made some props by hand. That’s why their performances were so vivid and excellent, which were much better than their teacher had expected. Gradually more and more pupils participated in this activity.
In order to motivate students to speak English in class, teachers would tell students to prepare a short report in turn. Before teachers gave their pupils the class, they would assign one student to do a daily report. Let’s take one student’s report as an example. The girl whose name is Zhang Hui told us a story about the theft happening on the train. After her report, students asked such questions: Is your story a real one? Has it ever happened to you? If you meet one thief on the train, what are you going to do? How do you think of it? Such a method could really motivate pupils’ participation in class. They asked questions voluntarily, and with their teacher’s help, the reporter answered their questions perfect.
As for group-discussion, the teacher would designed a topic related to the text or some current issues before explaining the text, then pided pupils into several groups to discuss. Usually each group appointed one person as a representative to show their views on the platform. (They could not choose same person each time.) Students who performed on the platform constantly received teacher’s praise and classmates’ applause, which made them more confident. The New Curriculum requires that pupils are encouraged to experience the language, participate in discussion and activities.