My Monday kids weren't quite as bright and responsive this week as they had been last week—I had to do a lot of shushing as some students became annoyingly talkative*—but they did take well to the round-robin drill that I put them through today, and that I'll be doing with my beginners on Thursday. Given my experience last semester, I have no plans to foist the round-robin format on my beginners as a permanent arrangement; instead, it'll merely be a periodic thing, happening only twice more this semester.
I have other activities planned, in the meantime, such as "unpunctuated dialogues," which are usually kind of fun: the students are given lines of dialogue, completely unpunctuated, and it's up to them to figure out who says what, and how. They have to exercise their own creativity, inventing scenarios that match the way they want to deliver the dialogue (or crafting the dialogue so that it matches the scenario). The results can be a little wacky, which is what I'm going for: oral production in a relaxed, low-affective-filter ambiance.
*Being talkative in a language class isn't necessarily a bad thing, but being talkative in the wrong language is.
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Unpunctuated dialogues sound like an interesting exercise. Is this of your own design or did you get this from somewhere else?
ReplyDeleteIt's something I made up, but like a lot of my inventions, I'd say it's not originally mine: much of what I do is ripped off from improv games, like those from "Whose Line Is It, Anyway?"
ReplyDeleteWell, very few "inventions" are truly original, but it sounds quite clever nonetheless.
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