Survey-Taking Sheets

About This Activity Type

Overview

These activities provide learners with an efficient means to quickly achieve mastery in communicating and understanding statistical information, personal preferences, and opinions. Each activity comes with sets of printable survey forms sufficient for a variety of different numbers of activity participants, from activities designed to be completed in partner-pairs all the way up to activities designed for as many as 40 simultaneous participants.

Methodological Basis

These survey-taking activities are a mix of information-gap and opinion-gap activities. Both of these activity types are part of the Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) methodology.

Due to the simplicity of the communication required for these activities, they are especially suitable for developing speaking confidence in English language beginners and near-beginners. However, they are also an efficient means of quickly developing the speaking skills needed to participate in more complex communication activities that utilize many of the same vocabulary words and similar basic sentence patterns.

Activity Versions

There are four different types of survey-taking activities that can be implemented for most sets of materials.

Authentic Survey Activities
Learners can use this survey-taking activity format to survey real people (classmates, family members, etc) and collect information about their personal preferences on difference job characteristics. The available survey-taking sheets have empty spaces to write names. This type of activity is suitable for environments where students have easy access to sufficient number of people, such as parents, who can answer questions for the survey. In the case of classes with at least 12 participants, an instructor can split the class in half and each half can take turns surveying the members of the other half.

Character Cards Based Activities
Suitable for a class of 12 or more learners (although 16+ is ideal), this survey-taking format uses character cards to ensure that participants get practice giving a wider variety of answers. Instead of answering survey questions based on their own opinions/preferences/situations, the participants answering survey questions play the role of one of the characters featured on the provided character cards and answer questions based on the information on the card that they draw from the deck.

Info Table Based Survey Activities
Best for younger learners (aged 4-6 who might not initially have the necessary confidence for some of the other survey activity formats), in this simple format, participants are given a survey form and they can then take turns asking survey questions to one person (usually a teacher), who has a complete Info Table answer key for (usually) 18 characters.

Information Trading Activities
This is the most efficient format for practicing collecting information, since participants can simultaneous collect and share information. Each participant is given a survey-taking sheet of information with a portion of the information missing. As each sheet features a unique but limited portion of the complete information, activity participants need to circulate around the classroom to find someone with the information they are missing.