Pedagogical Repertoire

1. Mission to the Moon/Alligator River: I have listed these two activities as a single activity because they are similar, insofar as they encourage learners to verbally negotiate and reach agreements in groups. The slight difference between the two is Mission to the Moon encourages the students to formulate logos-based arguments, whereas Alligator River encourages them to formulate ethos-based arguments. Before completing Alligator River as a class, Peter elicited expressions of agreement and disagreement according to register (formal/informal) and force; this step is crucial because it helps learners be aware of the language they need to use in order to negotiate effectively. Materials and descriptions of these activities can be found in Golub’s (2000) Making learning happen: Strategies for an interactive classroom (beginning pp. 61 and 71).

2. Life line: Students are placed in groups of three to five. Each student receives three sticky notes, and lists (with brief writing) three major events along with the associated dates. The sticky notes are placed in chronological order to form a kind of board game. Students roll dice to move across the board. If they land on their own sticky note, each person in the group can ask them one question about the sticky note. If the student lands on another person’s sticky note, he can ask that person three questions about the event. This activity is great for building familiarity/rapport, and for helping students to practice/produce question formulation.

3. Birthday Lineup: A kinesthetic speaking activity in which students line up in a horseshoe according to their birthdays without speaking to each other. After they have finished lining up, the students say their names and birthdays. In P&P, we first lined up based on how many languages we speak, and were able to speak with each other during the lineup. I envision myself using Birthday Lineup with beginners, perhaps having them practice lining up based on the alphabetic order of their first names (perhaps intermediate learners could discuss how many minutes it takes them to get to work, or to school).

4. My little guidebook to huge success: Students create a guidebook containing their goals and strategies for achieving their goals. The students are shown an example guidebook, and encouraged to reflect upon and write their own set of goals or strategies, and to decorate the guidebook according to their artistic inclinations. The teacher can provide less proficient writers (and less inclined artists) with prompts written/drawn on the board, or a partially completed guidebook handout. A page in this handout could read, for example, “studying in the ESL program will help me with this, my most significant goal: _______” (taken from the MLGHS handout in P&P).

5. Four square: This activity fosters peer-to-peer and small group spoken communication and negotiation. The teacher gives the students 4 hypothetical scenarios and 4 corresponding squares on the floor, and each student demonstrates a preference for one of the hypothetical scenarios by positioning herself/himself in the corresponding square. Students grouped in the same square then discuss their reasons for choosing the square, and create a group response to share with the class. This activity can foster type-2 conditional awareness (e.g. “if I could have lunch with Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton, the Pope, or George Clooney, I would have lunch with Elon Musk”). In P&P, “Four Square” was used primarily to build peer-to-peer rapport, and Willow and Annabelled developed a series of handout-based four square writing activities.

6. Kinesthetic punctuation: The basic premise is one student reads a handout to a group of students, the handout has punctuation spelled out (e.g. <comma> instead of <,>), and the students perform a specific movement for each type of punctuation. The students can either be walking in a circle, or in a line side-by-side (in a line side-by-side would need to be done in a large space, such as a gymnasium or outdoors). The teacher can provide the students with examples of movements (e.g. students slow down for “comma,” stop for “period,” jump for “exclamation point,” etc.), and encourage the students to develop their own (e.g. Tae Bo-inclined students may assign a punch-kick combo to the “semi-colon”). This activity was introduced to P&P students as Workstation H in the Grand Punctuation Workshop.

7. Squares: Ss are grouped in fours. Each student receives her/his own set of uniquely coloured squares* The groups are instructed to use the rectangles to build one square, five squares, and 11 squares. The stipulations are that all rectangles must overlap, and that students cannot touch other group members’ rectangles. By removing the possibility of touching another group member’s rectangles, the students are encouraged to verbally communicate their suggestions. I envision myself using this activity as a lesson warmer, and as practice or production of spoken politeness. This is a take on the “Cooperation Squares” game described in Golub’s (2000) Making learning happen: Strategies for an interactive classroom (p. 59).

*I am unsure how many rectangles each student should receive. Perhaps four?

8. Gambit chips: In order to give structure to peer-to-peer reflection or feedback on written assignments and presentations, give students “gambit chips” (smallish cards) with response prompts like “to me, the main part of your argument is X” or “tell me more about X.” This is taken from Stone’s Cooperative Learning & Language Arts (p. 140), provided as a handout in P&P. I can see gambit chips facilitating many different types of conversational activities (i.e. inner-outer circle, one-on-one feedback, group feedback) for learners of various proficiency levels. Gambit chips could even help native speakers develop conversational skills, like those offered by Julian Edge’s collaborative development system.

9. Outcome sentences: Taken from the Review and Assessment category of the SIOP model, outcome sentences are designed to encourage students to reflect on a lesson by completing one (or more) of the following sentences “I learned _____,” “I think _____,” “I wonder _____,” “I feel _____.” I believe students might enjoy writing these sentences on the board. For this, the teacher could create four columns for the four outcome sentences. Alternatively, students could write outcome sentences in class journals or on miniature white boards.

10. Film reenactment and adaptation: This activity begins with a focus on pronunciation, subsequently focuses on writing, and returns to pronunciation. Students, in pairs or threes, begin by selecting a short clip from a TL-culturally affiliated film or show they would like to reenact. Students record or perform the reenactment in front of the class, focusing primarily on prosodic replication. The students then adjust the register of the dialogue or the identity of the characters, if not both, and record or perform the adaptation for the class. The recordings/performances offer opportunities for instructor feedback on prosody, and the adaptation scripts can be used for writing assessment/feedback. So as to avoid the promotion of stereotypes, the instructor should check-in with each group at the beginning of the adaptation process.

11. 10 Cards: This activity facilitates vocabulary acquisition/review for course readings, and can be a good alternative to the traditional, handout-based keyword and definition matching activity. Students are grouped, and each group receives an envelope with 10 blank slips of paper. The group selects from a reading (previously read, in class or prior) 10 challenging words and writes the words and definitions on the slips, and places the slips in the envelope. Envelopes are then swapped between groups. Members in a group then take turns removing one slip from the new envelope and providing clues so the others can guess the word. If the slip-selecting student does not know the word, the slip is returned to the envelope and another slip is drawn. In order to scaffold toward this activity, the instructor should first provide the students with envelopes of ten pre-selected words and corresponding definitions, perhaps during a previous lesson.

12. Trivia review: Trivia can be played to review a unit or entire course, for which the teacher or students create categories and questions that represent the material and the learners. Post-its can be used to represent the point-oriented categories, and the questions/prompts written or typed on a separate document, or PowerPoint can be used to show the categories and provide the learners with visual text for the questions/prompts. If students create the categories, groups can be formed, and each group can create the questions for one category. A group will then not be allowed to play its respective category during Trivia Review. Example categories from P&P, here to inspire the development of new categories for different courses, include: world cultures & languages, Bloom & Crabbe, know your classmates, Precepts, acronyms, Krashen, instructor trivia, methods in the madness, cooperative concepts.