There are many different reasons for practising grammar. One reason is to develop greater precision, or accuracy. In other words, practising in order to get it right. Another reason is to develop the ability to produce the grammar item easily and fluently, without too much hesitation. This kind of practice is called fluency practice. Practice activities can also be divided up into those whose primary focus is on form (e.g. word order, word endings, pronunciation, spelling etc.), and those whose focus is mainly on meaning (or message). Traditionally, repetition drills focused mainly on form, while an example of a message-focused practice activity would be an information-gap activity, where students complete a task by exchanging information. Finally, some practice activities are aimed at getting students simply to understand the grammatical item but not necessarily to produce it: these are called receptive-practice activities. On the other hand, there are others that are aimed at production (either spoken or written): these are called productive-practice activities. A gap-fill exercise is an example of a written productive-practice activity.

Look at the picture and write six sentences describing what is happening. For example: Some children are playing with a ball.

This is a good example of a grammar practice activity. The aim of the activity is very clear: it provides students with a chance to manipulate a piece of language which they have just studied. And the teacher has an opportunity to see if students can use the target language correctly. However, while students expect to do grammar practice like this, they often find this kind of activity rather boring. In part, this is because there's no communicative reason for the activity. Once the students have written their sentences and the teacher has corrected them, the class will probably continue with something different.

A major challenge for teachers is to provide students with a reason for using the language and for then sharing their sentences with the rest of the group. If we can do this, we can make the activity more motivating and interesting for the group. Also, students are much more likely to remember the language if they have used it meaningfully. So how can we make this kind of grammar practice activity more communicative?

Having a reason for using the language means that the activity has an objective which goes beyond simply practising the language. For example, we could turn the activity above into a memory game. First students write their sentences – true or false – describing what is happening. Next the teacher removes the picture. Now students have to read their sentences to each other and try to remember if the sentences are true or false. The student who answers most of the sentences correctly is the winner. This activity gives the students a reason for speaking and listening to each other – that is to say, for using the language which they are practising.

It is possible to make even very controlled activities more communicative and to provide students with reasons for speaking and listening to each other. Look at this exercise:

What are you going to do?
Look at the picture and write sentences about these people's weekend plans.

One way of making the exercise more motivating is to personalise the activity, giving the students the opportunity to talk about themselves. And the coursebook suggests a good topic – plans for the weekend. So instead of using the pictures provided, we can make this activity more interesting by asking students to write about their own plans for the weekend. However, this still doesn't give the students a reason for speaking and listening to each other. So what are they going to do once they have written about their weekend?

One possibility is to tell students that they are going to spend the weekend with someone else in the group. To do this they need to tell each other their plans and choose the person whose weekend plans are most compatible with their own. Alternatively, the students could be asked to carry out a group survey. Here the task could be to find out the most popular weekend activities in the group and to draw a table which summarises the results. But whichever activity we choose, the important thing is that the students now have a reason for speaking and listening to each other.