Task-Based Language Teaching gets a lot of support from the research field. Communicative tasks with a real purpose to fulfil, maybe a purpose related to ‘real life’, are claimed to be an efficient and enjoyable way to promote language learning. I first discovered this type of activity back in the 1980s when they were sometimes called Task-Oriented Activities. They were common in the field of EFL/ESL, but less known in MFL classrooms. A classic book setting out their justification, with examples you could adapt for MFL, was Discussions that Work by Penny Ur, subsequently rewritten years later. It’s worth seeking out still. My experience with communicative tasks was positive, but like some other teachers, I found them most effective with advanced students who have a much greater stock of vocabulary and grammatical skill to call upon. The biggest supporters of task-based methodology argue that they can work fine with younger learners if the emphasis of the task is on input, not output. O
As you know, I'm keen on activities which involve a good deal of listening input, preferably as comprehensible as possible so as to maximise acquisition and student self-efficacy. This simple, low-preparation activity is a one-way listening task (listening without interacting) and allows you to revisit lots of previously used words and phrases. This is the activity. Read a series of definitions of words. The first letters of each word form an anagram of a word the class should already know. You can scaffold the listening by using gesture, maybe the odd translated word, repetition and pausing. If a student cannot solve a particular word, this is not necessarily a problem, since they can still solve the anagram with the letters they have. So here's an example of a nine letter word. The solution is the word RECYCLAGE. The definitions are at a level a very good Y9/Y10 class might cope well with. Possible definitions - remember that you would read this list in a different order to