Dear students, now, you may wonder how to design communicative activities to develop students' communicative competence. Ellis has listed six criteria for evaluating how communicative classroom activities are.

1. communicative purpose:

• The activity must involve the students in performing a real communicative purpose rather than just practicing language for its own sake.

• Therefore, there must be some kind of "information gap" that students seek to bridge when they are communicating.

• (Information gap means "信息差". Click the link for some Chinese explanation of it. It is one of the fundamental concepts in CLT.)

2. Communicative desire: 

• The activity must create a desire to communicate in the students.

3. Content, not form: 

• When students are doing the activity, they must be concentrating on what they are saying, not how they say it.  

4. Variety of language: 

• The activity must involve students in using a variety of language, not just some specific language forms.  

• Students should be allowed to use whatever language forms they choose.

5. No teacher intervention: 

• The activity must be designed to be done by the students working by themselves.

• There is no teacher correcting or evaluating how the students do the activity in the process of students' doing the activity. 

• However, teacher's evaluation of the final product of the activity on whether students have achieved their communicative purpose (rather than on language forms) is allowed, after students finish the activity.

6. No materials control:

• The activity should not be designed to control what language forms or what materials the students should use.