My definition of an activity is some cute lesson plan that doesn’t use CI, instead using English, or that is connected in some way to some some cool form of computer technology that does not create CI. Activities look like valid language instruction, but are not because they focus the attention on the language and not the message being delivered by the language, which is in reality how we acquire languages.
Somebody named Flo Martin has been sending me a lot of activities. Nice though they are, unless the students have acquired the vocabulary necessary to do the activity, they cannot understand the activity, or their attention is drawn to things that don’t have to do with comprehensible input, and the time is wasted.
Activities assume so much that we should not assume: they assume that the vocabulary necessary to do the activity has been acquired; that the subject, though interesting to the teacher, is interesting to the kids; that kids like to learn about stuff that is not interesting to them (they are only interested in themselves); that all the previous, unrelated, non CI-based activities in the year up to that point have created a foundation in sound so that the students can acquire the language via the new activity.