Most instructional materials developed in the past 10-15 years do not provide for sufficient activities to allow the student to become involved in anything other than drill and memorization. Furthermore, in those situations where "communication activities" do occur, they are designed to teach the sentence as a structural, grammatical element of the language, rather than utterance as it is used in the performance of acts of communication. It is possible, desirable, and appropriate to structure class activities, even at the first stage of instruction, to emphasize "purposeful" communicative language use, i.e., where sender and receiver interact to accomplish a mutually defined goal or objective. This paper considers the theoretical and practical issues as they relate to the incorporation of actual communication training in the elementary level ESL class. The vehicle employed for communication training is the task-oriented dyad--a simple system which allows for face-to-face purposeful communication between two individuals while providing the opportunity to manipulate variables such as interactant characteristics, feedback availability and task difficulty. The paper, specifically considers dyadic communication tasks appropriate for teaching and testing skills in three broad categories of communicative speech acts--requests, manipulative instructions, and descriptions. Sample protype classroom-tested tasks are appended. (Author/CLK)