Foreign-language texts used to have a lot more language in them and less culture. I'm not making this up. I have shelves of textbooks from the 1820s to the present. So, what is a teacher to do if he or she can't make up enough exercises for in-class work? Assign the workbook? I have another idea.
Most foreign-language teachers have had it happen. They plan a class, look at the day's grammar or other activity and notice the readings in the text, the beautiful pictures, think of taking all the transparencies to class, using a DVD... but the rubber must hit the road at some point. That is, the students must be able to demonstrate some ability to use, create, respond and manipulate vocabulary and grammar in creative ways.
There comes a moment, after the teacher has presentated and modeled the grammar, when the class is often divided into group discussion or tasked with asking and answering questions in the text. Often there are five or six questions and a teacher will divide the class into groups of two or three. What happens next is a result of students having been conditioned to do this much and no more, by an educational system that teaches them to be good test takers, to pick up and put down their pencils when a bell rings.
In many group activities with freshmen who are taking their first year of Spanish at the college level, I observe a group of three and notice that one person asks question 1 and the person to his or her left answers it, then asks question 2 and the person to his or her left answers it and so on. By the time they arrive at question five (often a minute or two) they think they are finished.
While this is somewhat logical, I realized that each person had not asked and answered each question -- thereby depriving them of the opportunity to pronounce, listen and articulate an answer. When I told them to start asking and answering them all again, starting with someone else so that eventually they would all do all the questions from both roles, they objected that they had already heard the answers on the first round. Again, this seems logical, until you point out that they don't answer those same questions in English in the same way every time -- that even How are you? can and does elicit different responses. i also remind them that if they do the exercises more than once, they can be perfect when I get to their group. To be fair, then, I wait until a group has gone through them once before seeming to be "grading" them.
Of course they groan and resist, but by recycling questions from a different point on the circle in a group exercise, even the textbook with the poorest selection of questions for group work can suddenly yield a few more minutes of group work. This also allows the teacher to circulate and listen to more groups.