Unit 17 - Practice activities and tasks for language and skills development

What are practice activities and tasks for language and skills development?

These are activities and tasks designed to give learners opportunities to practise and extend their use of language, such as a new vocabulary, functional exponents or grammatical structures, or of the subskills of reading, listening, speaking or writing. There are many different kinds of activities and tasks with different names and different uses.

Name	Activity
Brainstorming	Listing or shouting out ideas or language quickly
Sentence completion	Supplying words to finish a sentence
Extension tasks	Activities usually done at the end of the lesson to give further practice in target language or to consolidate language from a text
Making mind/word maps	Making or completing diagrams showing relationships between words
Surveys	Finding out what others think about a topic, often by completing a questionnaire
Visualization	Imaging what something is like/building up a picture of something in your head prompted by another person (usually the teacher)
Categorization	Putting words into groups according to a feature they have in common
Problem solving	Tasks which involved discussing and/or getting information in order to solve a problem
Mingling	Moving round the class to discuss or find out something from one classmate after the other

Reference:

Spratt, M., Pulverness, A., & Williams, M. (2012). The TKT Teaching Knowledge Test Course Modules 1,2 and 3 (Vol. Second edition). United Kingdom: Cambridge English.