Information Gap

An information gap is a difference in what two or more people know, used in language teaching to create a reason to speak. In an information gap activity each learner holds information the others need and cannot see, so the task can only be completed by exchanging it in the target language.

Where the idea comes from

The information gap belongs to the communicative approach, and it is the mechanism that approach uses to answer an awkward question: why would anyone in a classroom ask a question they already know the answer to. The British Council’s own teacher training materials put the principle in one line: An information gap is where one person knows something or has some information that the other person doesn’t, and they add the reason it matters, which is that real communication often contains an information gap.

The idea was given a working shape by N. S. Prabhu during the Bangalore project in the 1980s. His three task types are still the standard division: information gap, reasoning gap and opinion gap. An information gap task moves a fact from one person to another. A reasoning gap task asks learners to work something new out from what they hold. An opinion gap task asks for a preference, a feeling or an attitude, which Prabhu described as identifying and articulating a personal preference, feeling, or attitude in response to a given situation.

Research borrowed the same device almost immediately. As Pica, Kang and Sauro record, information gap tasks entered second language acquisition research through Long in 1980 as a way of studying what happens when learners have to make themselves understood. That double life, a classroom staple and a laboratory instrument, is why there is more evidence about this technique than about most things teachers do.

The two conditions that make a gap real

A great many activities are called information gaps and are not. The test has two parts, and both have to hold.

One. The information is uniquely held. Something one learner can see, hear or remember is unavailable to the other. If both sides are looking at the same page, there is no gap, whatever the worksheet is called.

Two. The task cannot be completed without the exchange. The outcome depends on information the learner does not have. If the activity can be finished alone, more slowly, the speaking is optional, and in most classes optional speaking does not happen.

	A real information gap	A gap in name only
What each learner can see	Different information, and only their own.	The same worksheet, or a partner’s paper within reach.
Why they ask	They need an answer they cannot get any other way.	Because the instructions said to practise in pairs.
The outcome	One correct result that both sides have to converge on.	Open ended, so nobody notices if it is never reached.
What happens when someone does not listen	The task stops, visibly, and they have to ask again.	Nothing. The pair finishes anyway.
The language it produces	Questions, clarification, repetition, rephrasing.	Reading aloud, or comparing answers already written.

The second condition is the one teachers lose. A gap can be perfectly well designed and then dissolved by a task that only needs half the information, and the activity will look like a speaking exercise that fell flat rather than a task that was never going to require speech.

One-way and two-way gaps

Information can be distributed in two shapes, and the difference decides who has to talk.

A one-way task gives everything to one learner. They describe, instruct or dictate while the partner draws, builds or writes. Describe and draw in its simplest form is one-way. It is easy to set up and it is the right shape when the point is extended speaking from one side, or listening from the other.

A two-way task splits the information so that each learner holds part of it and needs the rest. Spot the difference, split timetables, incomplete biographies and jigsaw readings are all two-way. Everyone has to ask as well as tell, which is why nobody can sit the task out.

The practical reading of the classroom research is that the two-way requirement is worth building in deliberately. Doughty and Pica compared teacher-fronted, small-group and paired arrangements on a task that required an exchange of information, and concluded that group and pair work have to be planned to include a requirement for a two-way or multi-way exchange. The grouping on its own did not produce the interaction. The task requirement did.

Building one in practice

1. Decide what the missing information is. Start from the fact, not the format. A departure time, a price, a middle name, the fourth step in a process. If you cannot name the missing fact, there is no gap yet.
2. Split it so that neither side can finish alone. Two versions of the same worksheet, A and B, each complete where the other is blank, is the standard and still the quickest to make.
3. Close the task. Give it one correct outcome: a completed table, two matching drawings, a correct order of events. A closed task is what makes learners keep asking until the answers agree.
4. Pre-teach the language of asking. Learners cannot close a gap with vocabulary they do not have. The question form, the ways of asking for repetition and the phrases for saying you did not catch something are the lesson’s real target language.
5. Check the instructions with concept checking questions. Can you look at your partner’s paper. What do you do if you do not understand. Two questions, thirty seconds, and most of the failures below disappear.
6. Separate the papers physically. Facing pairs, sheets held up, folders as screens. The design is undone the moment the partner’s sheet is visible.
7. Monitor without repairing. The breakdowns are the point. Note what learners could not say and deal with it in feedback rather than supplying the words at the table.

A worked classroom example

An A2 class of twelve adults in Cork, a lesson on telling the time and daily routine. The teacher makes two versions of a train timetable between four Irish towns. On sheet A, the departures from Cork and Mallow are printed and the ones from Limerick and Ennis are blank. On sheet B it is the other way round. The task is to work out which train a passenger must take to be in Ennis before four in the afternoon, which neither sheet answers on its own.

Language first, six minutes. What time does the train to Limerick leave. Sorry, could you say that again. The teacher drills both and leaves the question form on the board.

Setup, two minutes. Pairs face each other with the sheets held up. Two concept checking questions: can you see your partner’s timetable, and what do you say if you do not hear a number.

Exchange, twelve minutes. Each learner fills the blanks on their own sheet by asking. Numbers get misheard, which is useful, because the correction happens through repetition rather than through the teacher.

Outcome, five minutes. Pairs agree the one train that works and write it down. Answers that disagree send the pair back to the timetable, which is the closed task doing its job.

Feedback, five minutes. The teacher puts three things learners could not say on the board and reformulates them. The timetables are swapped and compared at the end so everyone sees the full version.

The wider family of gaps

Information is not the only thing learners can be short of, and the British Council’s own article on the subject widens the idea usefully. A gap, it says, is a difference: If there are two learners, A and B, and if A has some information which B does not, and possibly vice versa, then there is a difference or gap between the two learners.

Type of gap	What is missing	Typical activity
Information gap	A fact one learner holds and the other needs.	Describe and draw, spot the difference, split dictation, jigsaw reading.
Reasoning gap	A conclusion that has to be derived from what is held.	Working out a timetable, solving a logic problem, choosing the best option against criteria.
Opinion gap	Another person’s preference, feeling or attitude.	Ranking tasks, discussion of a dilemma, agreeing a shortlist.
Experience gap	What has happened to someone else.	Find someone who, questionnaires, past tense surveys.
Knowledge gap	What learners happen to know about the world.	Quizzes and brainstorms where learners genuinely know different things.

The practical value of the list is that the last three are free. An experience gap or an opinion gap exists in the room already and needs no photocopying, which is the argument for personalisation: real information about the learners is the cheapest gap a teacher has.

Commonly confused with

Term	Often confused with	The distinction
Information gap	Pair work	Pair work is a grouping. An information gap is a distribution of knowledge. A pair with identical sheets has the grouping and none of the gap.
Information gap	Jigsaw reading	Jigsaw reading is one application of the principle, with a divided text as the source of the gap. The principle covers many activities that involve no reading at all.
Information gap	Opinion gap	An information gap has a right answer to converge on. An opinion gap does not, so it produces longer turns and less precision, and it cannot be closed in the same way.
Information gap	Display questions	A display question is one the asker already knows the answer to, used to check understanding. It is the exact opposite of a gap, and it has its own legitimate uses.
Information gap	Role play	A role play assigns identities and a situation. It only contains a gap if the roles hold different information, which many role play cards forget to supply.
Information gap activity	Freer practice	Most information gaps are tightly controlled by the missing data, so they sit closer to controlled practice than the amount of talking suggests.

What the evidence actually supports

The task requirement matters more than the grouping. Doughty and Pica compared teacher-fronted, small-group and dyadic arrangements on a required information exchange task and concluded that group and pair work must be planned to include a requirement for a two-way or multi-way exchange of information. Putting learners in pairs is not the intervention. Giving them different information is.

Closed, precision-oriented tasks produce the clearest interaction. Pica, Kang and Sauro describe tasks that are closed-ended and precision oriented and require the exchange of uniquely held information, and report that these promote modified interaction and orient learners’ attention to form, function and meaning. That is a direct argument for the closed outcome in step three above.

They are not effortless to run. Pica’s later account of working with teachers is candid about the integration problems: tasks designed for research are not automatically good classroom activities, and making them serve both purposes took deliberate redesign. Teachers reporting that information gaps feel artificial are describing something the literature also found.

The limits are worth stating. Much of this work involves small numbers of learners in short studies, often in dyads rather than full classes, and it measures interaction rather than long-term acquisition. It shows that certain task designs reliably produce more negotiation of meaning. It does not establish how much of that negotiation converts into durable language, and the step from one to the other is still an inference.

Sources and further reading

The six linked sources below were opened and checked on 30 October 2026. The remaining items are books and a journal article with no freely readable edition to link to, so they are cited bibliographically rather than linked.

Source	What it provides
British Council, What is an information gap activity, Teaching Knowledge Database	The reference definition, the four reasons the technique is useful, and the standard activity types: describe and draw, spot the difference, jigsaw readings and listenings, split dictations.
British Council, Find the gap: increasing speaking in class	The wider family of gaps used here, including the experience, opinion and knowledge gaps, and the definition of a gap as a difference between two learners.
British Council, Teaching Speaking: trainer notes on activities	The teacher training formulation quoted at the top of this page, and the link between the information gap and personalisation in the communicative approach.
Pica, T., Kang, H. and Sauro, S. (2006), Information gap tasks: their multiple roles and contributions to interaction research methodology, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 28, 301 to 338	The design account of closed, precision-oriented tasks requiring uniquely held information, and the record that these tasks entered the research literature through Long in 1980.
Pica, T. (2005), Classroom learning, teaching, and research: a task-based perspective, Modern Language Journal 89(3), 339 to 352	What happened when information gap tasks were taken into ordinary classrooms, including the integration problems and the redesign that followed.
Yaprak, Z. and Kaya, F. (2020), Improving EFL learners’ oral production through reasoning-gap tasks, Advances in Language and Literary Studies 11(1), 40 to 50	A recent summary of Prabhu’s three task types with the definition of the opinion gap quoted from the original, used here for the gap typology.
Doughty, C. and Pica, T. (1986), Information gap tasks: do they facilitate second language acquisition, TESOL Quarterly 20(2), 305 to 325	The comparison of teacher-fronted, group and paired arrangements, and the finding that the requirement for a two-way exchange is what has to be planned in.
Prabhu, N. S. (1987), Second Language Pedagogy, Oxford University Press	The original three-way division into information gap, reasoning gap and opinion gap activities, from the Bangalore project.
Ur, P. (2012), A Course in Language Teaching, second edition, Cambridge University Press	Practical guidance on setting up, instructing and monitoring pair and group tasks where the teacher cannot hear everyone.

Frequently asked questions

What is an information gap?

An information gap is a difference in what two or more people know. In language teaching it is used deliberately: the teacher gives each learner part of the information and withholds the rest, so that the only way to complete the task is to ask for what is missing. The British Council defines it as the situation where one person knows something or has some information that the other person does not.

What is an example of an information gap activity?

Describe and draw is the standard example. One learner has a picture the other cannot see and describes it while the partner draws, and the two drawings are compared at the end. Spot the difference, split dictations and jigsaw readings and listenings are the other types the British Council lists. In each of them the information is held by one side only.

What is the difference between an information gap and pair work?

Pair work describes who is talking to whom. An information gap describes who knows what. Learners can sit in pairs with identical worksheets in front of them, which is pair work with no gap and usually very little talking. The useful question is not how the class is arranged but whether a learner could complete the task without asking anybody.

What are the three gap types in task-based learning?

Prabhu distinguished information gap, reasoning gap and opinion gap activities. An information gap task transfers a fact from one person to another. A reasoning gap task asks learners to derive new information from what they have by inference or deduction. An opinion gap task asks for a personal preference, feeling or attitude, so there is no single correct outcome to converge on.

Does an information gap have to work in both directions?

No. A one-way task gives all the information to one learner, who describes it while the other listens, draws or writes. A two-way task splits the information so that both sides have to ask as well as tell. Two-way tasks oblige everyone in the group to speak, which is why the research literature treats a required two-way exchange as the design feature that matters.

Why do information gap activities fail in class?

Almost always because the gap was not actually created. The commonest causes are identical worksheets, learners who can see each other’s papers, a task that can be answered from one half of the information, and instructions that were not checked, so the pair compares answers instead of exchanging them. All four are setup faults rather than learner faults.

Related terms in this glossary

• Jigsaw reading, the best known application of this principle, where a divided text supplies the gap.
• Task-based learning, the approach that made the gap a design principle rather than an occasional activity.
• Concept checking questions, the thirty seconds of checking that prevents most information gap failures.
• Fluency versus accuracy, the pair of goals a closed gap task sits between, since it pushes talk and still has a right answer.
• The full TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

For the qualification and career terminology behind classroom practice, see TEFL qualifications and terminology explained on The TEFL Institute. For what Irish employers ask for and how much practical teaching a course covers, see 120 hour versus Level 5 TEFL on The TEFL Institute of Ireland.

Last updated 30 October 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. All linked external sources were opened and checked on that date.