The Perfect Low-Prep Activity for Any Day in Our World Language Classes with Ben Fisher Rodriguez

Are you looking for a low-prep activity that can engage your students and spark great discussions in class? That activity is Card Talk. 

In episode 82 of Growing with Proficiency The Podcast, I was joined by Ben Fisher Rodriguez, an exceptional Spanish and German teacher, who shared his insights on Card Talk.  

Card Talk has many benefits.  First, it’s low-prep.  You only need a prompt.  Second, it can be used at any level.  Third, your students don’t need any specific linguistic knowledge to participate. 

In this post, I’ll highlight my conversation with Ben about this perfect low-prep activity. But, to hear all of the details about introducing Card Talk and strategies for adapting Card Talk to meet the varying needs of your students, listen to episode 82 here. 

What is Card Talk?

Card Talk is a simple yet impactful activity where students respond to a prompt by drawing or using images, and the teacher uses those responses to deliver personalized, comprehensible input.

Ben defined this activity as follows:

“Card Talk is a low prep, high leverage activity to increase personalization in your classroom, learn lots about your students, while also providing lots of high quality compelling input about the people that are in your room, which helps you establish what the culture of the people in your classroom is”. 

The How-To of Card Talk

There are a few steps to do Card Talk. 

1. First,  you need the cards,  You can use paper, heavy card stock, or even a digital slide. 
2. Second, you need a prompt that will trigger a personal response.
3. Once the prompt has been explained to the students, they respond to it through a drawing, or if it’s digital, using photos, stock images, or photos of themselves or photos they’ve taken.
4. Finally, the teacher picks a card or a slide to display.  Using the image as a support, the teacher talks about it with the class and asks follow-up questions to the specific student or related questions to the class. 

This discussion has the potential to make connections among students and discover personal information, opinions, and preferences.  While facilitating this conversation, the teacher is scaffolding new language and recycling language.

When to Use This Low-Prep Activity

The answer to this question is simple.  You can use Card Talk any time during the year.  Card talk can be used as a stand-alone activity or it can be embedded in a unit.  

Ben mentions,  “What I really appreciate about it is how flexible it is. With the prompts, you can kind of gear them towards a little bit of anything.”

According to Ben, “The most common prompt that most people start with, especially for level ones, is prompting students to draw a picture of something that they like.” Because you’re talking naturally with students about whatever their interests are, and asking pertinent follow-up questions that are compelling, you end up building out a lot more language than just the novel stuff.

Card Talk also allows students to answer to more complex prompts that can be difficult to answer with language because of its complexity. 

How to Use with Units

When Card Talk is used with units, it’s usually at the beginning to front load vocabulary, and also to build personal connection and interest in a topic. 

One example Ben shared was when he brainstormed with a colleague about a food unit she was required to do: “One of the things that we talked about was the prompt that could be on one side of the card which was to draw or find a photo of a food that has special meaning to your family. And then on the other side, draw or find a photo of a food that you hate or don’t like at all.”

By going through even just a few cards with students, you’re going to end up talking about the ingredients for these food items, foods that are similar to them, and what things taste like. Then, you’re also building a bit of culture by seeing what is culturally relevant to students and the foods liked by their families. That is good for any time of year. 

Card Talk as a Low-Prep Activity

You can also do Card Talk as a standalone activity, outside of a unit.  Card Talk is especially handy for those days when you say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do”? This is where this perfect low-prep activity really shines. 

Ben likes to do Card Talk with slides.  He finds it easier to manage, and it’s easier because you don’t have any physical objects. On any given day, those slides can become the content of the lesson for that day.  You only need to look at the prompt, look at some slides done by students, select a few, and then start Card Talk in class. 

Ben shared a few examples of how he uses prompts in his classes. As Ben said to me, one of the key strengths of this low-prep activity is that you can pick anything to talk about, anything that’s compelling and that students care about.

Benefits of Digital Card Talk

Even though we have many artistic students in our classes, we all have experienced when a student or group of students say “I’m not good at drawing.  I hate drawing”.  For those classes, digital Card Talk can be the solution.

In Digital Card Talk, the students open a slide in Google Slides or PowerPoint and add images to answer the prompt.  Then they share that slide with the teacher.  As a teacher, you can also create a presentation and have as many slides as students.  Then, you will share that presentation with your students.  You need to instruct your students to write their names to claim the slide and answer the prompt on that slide by adding images.

The other benefit of digital Card Talk is that you can save all those cards digitally without having to organize physical cards, and you will not lose them.  They will be handy for you when you have one of those days when you don’t know what to do or you have 15 minutes extra in class. 

How to Engage All of Your Students

One concern that I know some teachers may have is how to engage all of our students in Card Talk. Ben noted that, once again, you’re drawing on the strengths and the assets of the people in the room and their their lives, their culture, their ways of thinking, and what’s important to them. Ben also always starts with himself answering the prompt. 

Ben explained that he starts Card Talk off by always telling his students, “We’re going to do this activity to try to learn as much about everybody in our class as we possibly can. And the truth of it is, that everyone likes different stuff, and everyone’s life is different. We’re all going to cheer for everybody, no matter what they’re into, we’re just going to accept what they’re into, or what people’s lives are because they are what they are.”

Listen to episode 82 to hear Ben’s secret objective when he starts with himself answering the prompts.

Card Talk Tips for Engagement

1. One of the most important aspects of Card Talk is to build on the specific answer.  Even if we have a very basic drawing or image, by asking follow-up questions, we can extend the answers and expand to other students.  That is when having question-word posters is very helpful. 
2. To be able to expand and extend, comparisons are great.  Ben likes to draw as many comparisons between the people in the class as he possibly can. You can take a poll, count the hands, and write that number on the board. Then, you have a statistic that you can rely on. 
3. Alternating between asking questions of the student whose card is on the screen, asking comprehension, and circling questions of the class is key to maintaining the conversation flowing. Also, ask personalized questions to individuals and polling questions to the whole class. So, you’re building on those different question types to keep things moving and things fresh while adding lots of detail. Ultimately, you want to keep circling back to the student whose card you’ve been talking about.

What is Your Goal?

The #1 goal of this activity is to get to know our students better while providing a ton of comprehensible input.  The goal is not to master a specific grammar structure or have students produce at the end specific words.  If that is our goal, we may feel Card Talk is not effective because that accuracy builds over time. 

How can we assess if our goal was achieved? We can ask our students to share with us one thing they learn about a student in class.  If they can do that, then we know Card Talk was successful.

There are many activities similar to card talk.   Some of my favorites are also Calendar Talk, or Star Student interview. 

After Card Talk…

So, what happens after you have these conversations? Ben explained that he reviews the information with students about whatever came up, and then he does a write-and-discuss. This will help turn the oral conversation floating around in their heads into something concrete that you can review and look back on to see the things that have been learned.

Then, you have the text of that information. You can do so many things with that text and with that information. Ben has made little comic books titled “Our Class”. Then, you can have a page for each kid with a description of what they like and tell them to illustrate every detail that they can without words. You can also make the information the subject of a quiz.

Ben shared a few more ideas in episode 82.

Finally, I asked Ben to tell us a little bit more about write-and-discuss which you can listen to here. 

In our discussion, Ben also shared with me that he goes into this activity with a mindset of teaching his students about each other, and possibly himself as well.

I hope you click to listen to more about his mindset on teaching a language to his students and more of the conversation that Ben and I had about Card Talk. 

Listen to our whole conversation here and be prepared to be amazed at how effortless and effective this activity can be!