Classroom activity is what the teacher carries out to achieve certain teaching object. It needs both teacher and students to participate, and teacher is the organizer. The goal of designing different activities is to improve students’ communicative competence. According to Lei Da (2012), “The Activity approach with some interactive techniques in English class can help create a natural English speaking environment in class and establish a real communicative context to stimulate pupils’ interests in learning English.” That is to say, the activity approach makes it possible for students to practice English in a nearly real conversation, thus students can develop their communicative competence and find English useful then become interested in it. Zhang He (2014) also wrote in his thesis “activities-based approach can definitely improve the children's learning interest and the comprehensive language skills especially the listening and speaking skills. In addition, the approach is useful to change the children's attitude to the teacher and the English learning.”

2.3 Categorization of activities

According to different criteria, activities can be pided into various categories. One way to categorize is to see what the activity focuses on. “On one hand, there are those activities focused on the learning of forms, which are likely to foster the explicit learning of language. On the other hand, there are activities focused on the content, more aimed at the comprehension of the communicative message and the implicit learning of language.” (Joaquín Gris Roca, 2015) As explicit activities focused on forms, activities such as grammar translation and decontextualized vocabulary exercises fall into this category. They both pay much attention to the grammar patterns or encourage learners to reflect upon the formation of linguistic structures. On the contrary, implicit activities aim to develop students’ English proficiency in a more natural way. Content is more important than form. Teachers’ role in these activities is supporter or guide. They won’t interfere in the process but just give some help if necessary. Therefore, students should be more active and willing to cooperate with others. 来*自-优=尔,论:文+网www.youerw.com

Different from Roca, Lei Da (2012) thought classroom activities could be pided into two groups-dynamic ones and static ones. Activities, such as playing games and role-play, which need students participate through actions are dynamic. Static activities include telling English stories and singing English songs which just require students to listen and speak. According to his research, students are more likely to choose dynamic activities and they are not so interested in traditional activities like reading word cards or even card games. However, teachers prefer to use these static activities because in this case, students can be well controlled so that the class can go through smoothly. Another reason is that to design a new activity is time consuming and troublesome, but teachers can’t afford this time. As we can see, here is a gap between students and teachers.

There are also other ways of classification. For example, based on different functions, activities can be pided into lead-in activities, practice activities, extension activities as well as communicative activities and so on.