In class on Friday, we participated in an example lesson that utilized all four of the language learning skills. This lesson, alligator river, first asked students to listen to a story and use their understanding of word derivations to rate the story’s characters’ morality. We, the students, rated the 5 characters on our own first, then shared our rankings and opinions of those rankings in small groups. We then came to a conclusion as a group about the rankings and shared these with the rest of our class.

Catherine and I really enjoyed the way this activity facilitated a passionate discussion. We think that the story painted such an abominable picture that students were interested in sharing their judgments of the characters. Certain characters were more easily agreed upon than others. This allowed students to practice agreeing and disagreeing with each other, with a focus on communicative fluency. It also provided an opportunity for expression of opinion and debate practice. We very much appreciated the tiered approach this lesson took. It allowed students time to first think and reason with themselves (allowing for development of language expression). Then students worked in groups to practice expressing their opinions, which provides for peer feedback on vocabulary and grammar usage. Finally the group shared their views with the class. This helps all students to feel comfortable sharing their ideas and utilizing language.

The lesson also included a possible station section that allowed students to continue developing their language fluency in areas that they felt comfortable with. We liked how the different language skills were used to help students gain a deeper understanding of the story and self expression in the target language. Students could choose to participate in debate (which focuses on oral fluency), writing a letter (written fluency) or digital exploration of the story (reading fluency). We found this to be a really innovative use of stations in the classroom and both look forward to incorporating it into our future classes. I’ve both used stations in the past but usually as a review of learned knowledge. Catherine has used stations directly after introducing new material as a tactic to delve deeper into the topics at hand. We both felt that this example illustrates a practical use of stations to improve fluency.

Thanks for the useful suggestions Peter. We definitely learned a new way to teach opinion expression, agreement and fluency.

Annabelle & Catherine