Communicative activities play a key role in the ELP. They appear in the language passport and in many language biographies. The main stages in any activity are design, execution and assessment. Here we will focus on the design of an activity, since part of the work with the ELP is concerned precisely with designing communicative language activities. Generally speaking, activities have to be designed whenever a descriptor is a subject of learning and a communicative activity is therefore the starting point for learning operations. This then raises the question of how to make the progression from a descriptor of a communicative activity to the activity itself, in other words how to design a successful activity.
Why in fact should ELP users design tasks? Learners managing their ELP will assess themselves using checklists of communicative activities (as in the case of the Swiss ELP). Following self-assessment, they will set themselves learning objectives, of the "communication activities" variety. How will they achieve these activity objectives? What can they do? Other learners working with their ELP may find that their school textbook (or even the curriculum) fails to cover all the learning objectives, and that the book does not offer activities that might illustrate them. They must therefore design these activities, taking the activity descriptors as their starting point. Alternatively, teachers may discover that a school curriculum emphasises the common reference levels in terms of communicative activities – in other words is directly based on the ELP – but that there are no textbooks adapted to this type of objective. They must therefore "teach" these activities to their students or pupils.