Non-communicative activities Communicatice activities
No communicative purpose A communicative purpose
No desire to communicate A desire to communicate
Form not contentContent not form
One language item Variety of language
Teacher inventionNo teacher invention
Material control No material control
We now have a basis for assessing some of the activities mentioned at the befginning of this article. A 'communicative drill' (even where it is based on an information gap, thus creating a communicative purpose and perhaps a desire to communicate) is a contradiction in terms, since it hardly meets our communicative criteria. Drills are, after all, form-based and deal with only one or two language items at a time. The purpose of a drill, after all, is largely manipulative, to encourage the accurate reproduction of prescribed language. And even where students are left to work in pairs, the teacher will probably check accuracy by getting feedback. However, such information gap based activity is perhaps not as extreme an example of the 'non-communicative' as a drill from Abbs and Freebairn (1980b) in which students are given a prompt sentence and have to respond with a set formula. The example is as follows
You are at a party.
Meet John. He teaches at the High School.
How funny! I used to teach at the High School too. (37)

Students then have to respond in the same way to sentences such as 'And this is Mark. Mark has just got an old black Volkswagen.'
Morrow's (1979) information gap activity (where the student has a train timetable with various bits of information missing which can be completed only by getting the information from his or her partner without looking at the partner's timetable) is moving towards the 'communicative' end of the continuum, but still suffers from materials control.

The 'Describe and draw' game, however, does meet our communicative requirements. One student has a picture which his partner must reproduce without looking at the original. The only way to achieve this purpose is to use all and any of the language at the students' command. The same is true of the 'reconstructing a story sequence' activity; students will use a great variety of language as they find out what is in each other's pictures, and use this information to construct a story. Although the desire to communicate has been created artificially, the students do have some communicative purpose to achieve through the use of language. Many of Byrne's (1979) written communication activities meet our communicative requirements: students have to write job application letters, which are then judged by other students and on the basis of which a candidate is chosen; students write individual news items which are then assembled into news broadcasts, etc.

A genuinely communicative activity, then, must comply with the characteristics I have detailed here. Few people, however, would suggest a language programme based exclusively on such activities (but see, for example, Allwright 1976). Neither should a methodology confine itself rigidly to activities that omit any possibility of formal and controlled language work. There is nothing intrinsically 'wrong' with the drill with an information gap, or the example above from Developing Strategies. But neither is communicative or sits comfortably in a communicative 'approach'. The job of a syllabus-or course-designer is surely to work out an efficacious balance between non-communicative and communicative activities, and the many possibilities between these extremes, of which only a small number have been mentioned here. Language learning can then be judged not according to whether it is communicative, but according to the balance of activities that students are involved in.