Questions to ask yourself

The following questions will serve as reminders as you begin to shift your lessons from the traditional style to a communicative one.

- Have you established your credibility by using the familiar lecture format?

- Do you plan to introduce the communicative approach slowly, one activity at a time?

- Are you enhancing your lectures and discussions with visual and aural stimulation, action and reaction?

- Have you trained your students to participate in a discussion and other whole-class activities? Are they prepared with background information and ideas about what to say or ask?

- Have you linked whole-group activities to topics of student interest? Are you posing problems and requesting student solutions?

- Have you remembered to incorporate the grammatical points required by your syllabus into your creative activities?

In this chapter, we have encouraged you to enhance your lectures with communicative discussions and creative activities. These communicative teaching approaches will interest and challenge your students, but don't limit your lessons to these whole-class options. In Chapter Eight we will show you how to introduce your students to cooperative learning through pair work, so you can help them experience the additional social and academic benefits of a learner-centered classroom.