Classroom techniques and task.

Classroom Assessment Techniques are a set of specific activities that instructors can use to

quickly gauge students‟ comprehension. They are generally used to assess students‟

understanding of material in the current course, but with minor modifications they can also be

used to gauge students‟ knowledge coming into a course or program. According to David

Nunan (2003:56) there are five classroom techniques for the activity of students ;

1. Information gap is useful activity in which one person has information that the other

lacks. For instance, one student has the directions to a party and must give them to a

classmate.

2. Jigsaw activities are bidirectional or multidirectional information gap. Each person in

a pair or group has some information the other person need. For example, one student

could have a timeable for train travel in Canada. Another could have a map of

Canada. Without showing each other the visual information, they must speak English

to plan a one week trip.

3. Role plays are activities that students are given particular roles in the target language.

For example, one student plays a tourist telephoning the police to report his wallet

stolen. The other plays the role of a police officer trying to help the tourist file a

report. Role plays give learners practice speaking the target language before they must

do so in a real environment.

4. Simulations in this activity props and documents provide a somewhat realistic

environment for language practice. For instance, in a language lesson about the

grocey store, a teacher might bring in “products” for students to buy (a box of

crackers, coffee, a jam of jam) and even play money for making their purchases.

5. Contact assignments in this activity the researcher observe the foreign language

students. In FL context if there are tourist, exchange students, or international

businessperson for your students to talk to in target language. In a train station or at a

ferry terminal, for example, students can interview tourists. Afterwards the students

compile the result of the class survey and report what they learned.

Another expert defines the techniques in the following four example Jeremy Harmer

(1998:88) explain he is going to look at very different speaking activities, from

puzzle-like task to more involved role-playing. All the activities satisfy the three

reasons for speaking tasks which we mentioned above.

1. Information gaps, one type of speaking activity involves the so called

„information gap‟ where two speakers have different parts of information, there is

a „gap‟ between them.

2. Surveys, the teacher wants students to activate all their language knowledge and

would be only too happy if this provoked natural use of these knowledge. For

example, the topic is sleep-ways of sleeping, sleeping experiences etc. first o all,

the teacher talks about sleep. Perhaps he tells a story about not being able to sleep,

about a nightmare, or about someone he has seen sleepwalking. He gets students

to give him as much „sleep‟ vocabulary as they can (e.g„dream‟,‟nightmare‟,‟walk

in your sleep‟,‟heavy sleeper‟,‟light sleeper‟). The students now work in pairs to

plan questions for their sleep questionnaire and the teacher goes round helping

where necessary.

3. Discussion most teachers hope that they will able to organize discussion sessions

in their classroom, particularly if the exchange of opinions provokes spontaneous

fluent language use. Many find, however, that discussion sessions are less

successful than they had hoped. The important thing is students need to be

engaged with the topic. They then might do some study (if there is a necessity for
 language input, facts or figures, for example) and move quickly to activate stages-

which include the discussin itself. However there will be feedback, including

study, after the discussion is over.

4. Role-play this activities are those where students are asked to imagine that they

are in different situations and act accordingly. We may tell them to role play being

guest at a party, travel agents answering customer questions or participants in a

public meeting about a road building project for example. This activity need some

cards. The students decide who is who in each group and the teacher then hands

out the following cards to the individuals, with the instruction that they should

read them but not show them to anyone else. Then they must stick to the

information and find the card which fit with that information.