The term activity is more general and refers to any kind of purposeful classroom procedure that involves learners doing something that relates to the goals of the course. For example singing a song, playing a game, taking part in a debate, having a group discussion, are all different kinds of teaching activities
There are many different types of activities that we create for our foreign language students. In the communicative language classroom there are two broad categories of activities: exercises and tasks.
What is TASK? A task is clearly distinguished from both an exercise and activity then by non-language orientated outcome and its focus upon meaning, as well as the clear interaction necessary in tasks.
Information gap; a task in which information has to be shared in order to understand the ‘full picture’. That is to say that perhaps one student is given half the information and the other student, the other half, they must verbally convey the information to each other in order to synthesise such and create meaning.
Reasoning gap; using skills of reasoning, deduction, inference, or perception, learners will create new information using select existing information.
Opinion gap; tasks which are centred on students expressing feelings or opinions, such as in a debate or discussion.
What is exercises?
An exercise is a teaching procedure that involves controlled, guided or open ended practice of some aspect of language. A drill, a cloze activity, a reading comprehension passage can all be regarded as exercises.
