Are you feeling bored and uninspired in your own language classroom? I’m not talking about your students, I’m talking about YOU. The truth is, we all need new ideas and fresh perspectives to keep us engaged and motivated in our teaching practice. That’s why I love attending conferences like SCOLT to hear about new language strategies that I can use with my students.
Language Strategies and Activities from SCOLT
In episode 27 of Growing With Proficiency The Podcast, I’m sharing 5 of my favorite language strategies and activities that I learned at SCOLT 23. All of the 5 language strategies and activities have one thing in common: they not only have the potential to engage my students and promote proficiency, but they also excite me to use them. When I’m excited, that energy transfers right back to my students.
PechaKucha
I learned this language activity in the session with native and heritage speaker Lucy Alfonso. This is where you do a presentation with 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. Now, this is the thing, you’re only going to have a picture or maybe a few pictures. The other thing is that you’re not going to have any text, and you can speak for 20 seconds per slide.
Sometimes, we don’t truly give native speakers what they need because some of them are in our level one classes, level two classes, and level three classes, and the linguistic proficiency may not be the right one to be in the level one because they need more. This language strategy allows a student’s heritage, and native speakers, to also do presentations, maybe in a more deeper way, about things and experiences that they bring to the class. In episode 27, I talk about PechaKucha in a PowerPoint presentation.
Free Voluntary Reading
Cecile, during a SCOLT presentation, did a session on teachers as librarians and establishing a free choice reading program. This gave me so many great ideas, but there was one activity that I thought we all can use, even if we don’t have a free voluntary reading program.
She called it book speed browsing, or somebody else in that session said, “book tasting”. The idea is that you have different books, and you are going to put maybe 20 books that you’re going read and select out in different areas of your class. Then, you give your students the book, and then a form where they can look at the title of the book and some insights about the book.
Why? Because we want them to help select the perfect book for themselves. Then, each student is going to have one or two minutes to read maybe the first or two pages of the book. After one or two minutes, then we’re speed browsing. So, you move to the next one. And then you move to the next one. If you have 20 books, it is maybe 40 minutes, and then you’re going to be able to have this browsing of books so they can choose their book. I share a few alternatives to this in episode 27.
Guess the Movie
Next, James Morgan did a very great session about listening comprehension strategies. This uses video, and I put the link for it in the show notes of episode 27. The video describes with pictures and with drawings five different movies, and you divide your class into groups. Each group will listen to the description and guess which movie it is. There are a couple of things to remember. First, it has to be movies that your students know. Ask your students in a survey at the beginning of the year, or the beginning of the quarter, what is your favorite movie? What is a movie that you really like? And from that, you can really identify movies that are really popular among your learners. You can do that with singers, you can do that with TV shows, and you can adapt this activity to all of that.
Second, I think that it’s important that you don’t let your students guess what the movie is, until the end of the description. Why? Because we want them to listen more about the movie because that is comprehensible input.
Students write their guess down. Then, you say 123, let me see. And then the students are going to show on a whiteboard what their guess of name of the movie is. Whoever got it correct can throw the dice. It will give them as many points as they get on the dice. So that will keep it engaging.
Brain Breaks
The next language strategy and activity is from my friend, Annabelle Williams en La Maestra loca. In her session, one of the brain breaks was Rock Paper Scissors with numbers. Students can, not only, work in pairs but also in groups of three and four. The next one is called Cup which Annabelle said to be careful with concussions. We were like, “What?”, but you’ll understand in a minute.
In Cup, basically, you’re going to put a cup on the floor or a paper plate. You’re going to have your students stand in front of each other with the cup or the paper plate on the floor in between them. Then, you say words like head ,and the students touch their head. Or, you say shoulders, and they touch their shoulders. When you say cup or plate, the student who first grabs their cup or plate wins. Now, this is the thing, you don’t want students to grab with their hands, but, instead, touch it with their feet and drag it to themselves. That’s you avoid the concussion part.
Hexagon Thinking
I learned this a few years ago from Cult of Pedagogy, and I thought that it was a great idea. But, I never knew how I would be able to put that incredible language strategy work in my language class. Bertha Delgadillo talked to me about it, and we included it in our session about leading intermediate learners with comprehensible input.
So what is hexagon thinking? Hexagon thinking is a strategy that is going to help our students make connections among ideas or topics. What we do is create some hexagons, maybe six to ten of them. In the middle of each hexagon, you choose the topics. So, if you’re reading a book, or you’re watching a movie, it can be characters. It can be conflicts, it can be themes, or it can be places. Basically, what you do at the end of the unit, and it’s going to be like kind of a summative assessment, is to have your students put those extra hexagons next to each other to make connections. Also, have them explain their thinking.
This is a great strategy where students are going to be able to develop connections and really go into the critical thinking that is so important.
I hope you’ve found my 5 language strategies and activities from SCOLT23 helpful and that you try at least one of them in your classroom. In episode 27 of the podcast, I share a few more strategies and go into a little more detail about these activities.
So, if you’re looking for ways to shake things up in your class and get excited, hit play above or on your favorite podcast player, and join me for this exciting episode of Growing With Proficiency. You can also listen to all of the episodes HERE.
Resources & Links from Episode 27
My Framework
GWP Spanish Teacher Academy Waiting List
IG & Twitter: @claudiamelliott
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