When a teacher asks you “What colour is my car?”, this is an unusual question, usually asked in a classroom, but not found outside the classroom and therefore it’s not useful for real life. Instead the communicative language teaching method is based on authentic real life experiences where the student can learn useful language skills, language functions and syntax to apply in real life situations.

Task -based learning offers an alternative to the classic methods such as PPP (Present, Practise, Produce). The lesson is based around the completion of a central task and the language studied is determined by what happens as the students complete it. The students are free of language control. They must use all their language resources rather than just practising one pre-selected item.

You can speak a lot and practise orally but this doesn’t mean that you are communicating. In general, the goal of oral practice is to practise a language function, syntax or grammar rule to improve accuracy, whereas the goal of communicative tasks is to communicate in a real-life simulated environment to improve language skills for different situations as well as language fluency and accuracy.

When the teacher has control of the activity in a conventional classroom, it’s a guided practice activity. Instead, our method allows the learner to be in control as well, and this allows real communication. When the teacher is telling you how to do it and why to do what you are doing, this is practice, but isn’t beneficial to the students who need to be given some kind of freedom to make their own choices.