Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Kaypea]

Do you use information gap partner activities? (Person A has some information, Person B has to ask questions to find things out).

I don't bother anymore because they're difficult to police.

To be honest, I can see why the students aren't stimulated by these activities.

Still, I can't help but think they may have some pedagogical value... I think they can be interesting too, maybe if the subject matter is interesting or they're used as a competitive team game for the class.

Do you guys have good ideas for information gap activities?

[Fishead soup]

It depends on several situations.

Are you teaching large classes of Multi-lingual students.
If you are, these might not be the best activities to use. One of the temptations many students will simply just copy what's on their partners sheet. This is a result of the Korean test driven attitude of end result is more important than process.

If you are teaching smaller groups of students in the Multi-Media room then you might want to give information gaps a try. They also work well for camps and after school programs where you have more freedom to do what you want.

Andrew Finch has a lot to say about these kinds of activities.
In General Static tasks or one way tasks should always come before dynamic two way tasks. You might want introduce the Target Language with some kind of word find or a Brainstorming activity. This gives the students ownership of the language.

Another thing is that we always feel the class was somewhat a failure if students do the activity in L1. In many cases the studenst who are doing the activity in L1 are actually getting at least some benefit.

There are many way's to reduce the problem of students copying or reverting to L-1. One way to do this is show two pictures of a living room and ask them how the pictures look different. Unlike the information transfer activities it's much more difficult for students to simply copy off their partner.

Another obvious problem is the way these kinds of activities are taught by Korean co-teachers when they use the regular textbook. They tend to race through these kinds of activities and just translate everything. So their's a good chance if you are doing this kind of activity the students are doing it for the first time so you might need at least some instruction in
L-1 so the students know what they actually have to do.