CONTENT:

The activation phase - 3 of 4

This activity might suddenly give way to a ball game (one example has been given above) that the teacher organizes within seconds; and, in all likelihood, at the end of the ball game the group will break into another song which the teacher may follow up with two or three relevant jokes that the students, in twos, will repeat to each other while seated. Before the slower "joke tellers" have finished. the teacher may well be handing out index cards to each student, who must then get up, rush around looking at everyone else's cards and matching up the cards that go together, usually for some grammatical reason.

In fact, all of the activities are grammatically and lexically relevant, but this is rarely brought to the student's attention. S/he is supposed to perceive these activities as plausible extensions of passages in the text, having a nonlinguistic  raison d'etre.