In communicative instructional settings
-input is simplified and made comprehensible by the use of contextual cues, props, and gestures, rather than through structural grading. Students provide each other with simplified and sometimes erroneous input.
-there is limited amount of error correction on the part of the teacher, and meaning is emphasized over form. Student tend not to overtly correct each other’s errors when they are engaged in communicative practice. Because the focus is on meaning, however, requests for clarification may serve as implicit feedback. The need to negotiate for meaning may help student see the need to say something in a different way.
-learner usually have only limited time for leaning. In a typical teacher-fronted classroom with 25-30 students, individual student get very little opportunity to produce language in a sixty-minute class, and when they do, it’s usually in form of a short response to a teacher’s question. When student work in pairs or group, they have opportunities to produce and respond to a greater amount and variety of language. Sometime, however, subject-matter courses taught thought the second language can add time for language learning. A good example of this is in immersion programmes where most or all the subject matter is taught to a group of students who are all second language learners.
-as in structure-based instruction, it is usually only the teacher who is a proficient speaker. Learners have considerable exposure to the inter-language of other learners, particularly in student-student interaction. This naturally contains errors that would not be heard in an environment where the interlocutors native speaker, but it provide many more opportunities for student to use the target language than is the case in most structure-based instruction.
-a variety of discourse types may be introduced through stories, peer-and group-work, the use of ‘authentic’ materials may include both those modified for second language learners and those intended for native speaker in the little case, teachers use instructional strategies to help learners get the meaning, even if they do not know all the words and structures. In student-student interaction, learners may practice a range of sociolinguistic and functional features of language through role –play.
-there is little pressure to perform at high levels of accuracy, and there is often a greater emphasis on comprehension than on production, especially in the early stages of learning.