The Communicative Follow Up is the final stage of a reading or listening lesson.
In the communicative methodology, reading or listening texts are not simply texts to be absorbed for comprehension. They also serve as prompts for communicative activities in which students can talk and write about their own ideas.
It is traditional to have the communicative activity match the receptive skill. Reading and writing are thought to be related skills, so after a reading lesson, the communicative follow up activity would be writing. Similarly, listening and speaking are related skills, so after a listening lesson, there would be a speaking activity.
However, this is not a hard and fast rule, and the teacher should also take into account student preferences (many students prefer to use in-class time for speaking practice, and to do writing at home). Also the student should take into account whether the topic lends itself to a speaking activity or a writing activity.
One possible communicative follow up activity is to just give students a list of discussion questions on the same topic as the reading or listening text. This is often the simplest and most straightforward activity to design, and it is also very easy to set-up in class (i.e. instructions to students are very simple "Here are some questions, discuss them with your group).
However, these are not always the best type of activity, because the students may lack motivation to just discuss the question if there is no greater purpose to the discussion. (But this will depend on the motivation level of your class. For highly motivated students, a list of discussion question may work just fine.)
However, a better communicative activity usually contains a communicative outcome--that is, the students need to achieve something during the activity. For example "plan a vacation with your group. Where will you go? What will you do? Where will you stay? etc" This works better because now the students are not simply talking for the sake of talking, but they actually have an outcome that they need to achieve to complete the activity successfully. (This idea could be used as a communicative follow up to any reading or listening text that was about travelling).
Other popular communicative activities are:
* role play . Students are put into pairs, or small groups, and assigned characters from the reading or listening text. Each character has a goal for the conversation. (e.g imagine a reading text or listening text that involved some sort of conflict between characters. In the role play, the students could be assigned one of the characters, and the goal could be to resolves the conflict.)
* ranking activity. students are given a list of things that relate to the reading or listening text in some way, and must rank them in order of importance. They and their partner must agree on the rankings, so the communicative activity is to talk through the rankings until they reach an agreement. (e.g. for a reading or listening text on travel, students could rank the most important features when choosing a destination)
* balloon debate. there are six people in the hot air balloon, and the balloon is too heavy. One person needs to be thrown out to save the lives of the other five. Who will it be? This activity could be directly adapted to a reading or listening text using the characters from the reading or listening. Or, it could be loosely adapted as just a "choose which one is out" activity. (e.g. again, sticking with the theme of travel, a follow up to a reading and listening text on travel could be: you are going on a camping trip. Here are six items. You can only bring 5. With your partner, decide which item you are going to leave behind.)
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The communicative activity should in some ways expand on the topic of the reading or listening text.
With the traditional style textbooks, this used to be fairly straightforward. For example, a listening text would be 4 characters talking about movies that they liked. The communicative follow up, then, would be for the students to talk in their groups about movies that they liked.
However, recently textbooks quite often are about topics that are not related to the students' lives, such as the National Geographic books, and then some creativity is required to create a communicative follow up. However, with some creativity, it is usually possible to relate some aspect of the text to the student's lives.
For example, when teaching out of a National Geographic textbook, I once had to teach a lesson on Alaskan Ice Climbing. This was a listening text about mountaineer guides in Alaska who guide tourists through the dangers of ice climbing. It was completely unrelated to the lives of my students in Vietnam, so for the communicative follow up, I had the students pretend to be tour guides in Vietnam and think of the dangers in Vietnam that they needed to warn tourists about--see example here.
Another example of a listening text I had to teach that was completely unrelated to my students' lives was this lesson on the reindeer people of Mongolia. The lesson was about how the traditional way of life among the reindeer people in Mongolia are threatened because of the end of government subsidies. Again, it was completely related to the lives of my students, but I created a role play in which a government official had to negotiate between the needs of the urban workers and the nomadic reindeer herders--see here.
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Because Communicative Follow Ups are often a type of free conversation, I used to refer to them as "free practice" in my lesson planning. (And if you look through my old archives, I think you can find some communicative follow ups mislabeled as "free practice" in my old lesson plans.)
But a couple of years ago, when I was working with an experienced CELTA tutor, he took great care to always correct me whenever I said "free practice" for a reading or listening lesson. So now I try to always take care to differentiate between "free practice" and "communicative follow up".
The difference is that free practice takes place at the end of a grammar lesson. So there is a specific grammar point that the students are practicing, and at the end of the free practice the teacher can provide feedback on how accurately the students were using the grammar (or vocabulary).
With a communicative follow up, however, there is no language point that is being practiced. It is simply practicing general fluency, and communicative ability.
As such, there is no need for feedback on language mistakes. If the students can complete the task, they have successfully fulfilled the communicative objective. The teacher can (and should) give some sort of feedback on the task. (e.g. "Oh, that looks like a very nice vacation that you've planned. I like the way you included so many outdoor activities. I would like to go on your vacation myself." etc) But there is no need to give feedback on language accuracy.
The exception to this, however, is if you're teaching a class where the students really want a lot of feedback on language accuracy. Then, you can integrate some language points into the feedback. However, because communicative follow ups are fluency activities, don't interrupt the students while they're speaking. Save all the language accuracy feedback points until the end of the activity.
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