Family members activity – Adnan
Posted by aalhammody on May 14, 2013
In one of my classes, I introduced another activity to my students. As part of vocabulary building, we discussed the family members as requested by students because they expressed their confusion about using them in English. The activity which was new to them was to match the new word with its definition. So I explained the directions for students. Every one will have a couple of strips of paper containing two words (family members; father, sister, cousin, etc.) and two strips containing definitions of different words. The idea was to have the students engage in the activity and discuss in English with each other. I gave them directions to look for the definition of the words they have on the strips of paper through asking their peers. I modeled the task for them to make sure they understood what their task was. While they were finding the words and definitions, I moved around to make sure that all students were doing their job correctly and that they were speaking in English. After they found the definitions, I asked them to stand next to the person they found the definition with.
The students were so excited about the new activity. They really liked it. A couple of them could not wait for others to finish. They came to me and said, “we found the words, teacher” with a big smile on their faces. Then asked them to stand next to each other before the board and I asked each one of them to read his word and the other student would say the definition and so on. Then I asked them about the activity and they said that they loved it.
May 29th, 2013 at 9:39 am
Thanks for sharing this activity! I love it for younger students (although I’m sure it would be great for older students as well!) I think you’ve found a great way to mask the pen and paper “match a word with it’s definition” activity with something more interactive to keep the students engaged – I agree with Sarah in that regard! Based on the excitement of the students, it seems you’ve developed a great relationship with your students. If I’m ever asked to teach young ESL/EFL students, I’m coming to you for ideas!
May 28th, 2013 at 5:46 pm
Thank you Adnan for sharing this activity. I can see that you relied on group interaction in this activity. It is necessary for students to lear from their peers some of the techniques such as asking questions and negotiation for meaning (Long, 1998). I would only recommend when modeling this activity in the future to raise students’ awareness regarding the advantage of this activity or the goal in the beginning. For example, you can say in the beginning of the activity that today we will learn how to say our family members in English. 🙂
May 14th, 2013 at 11:43 pm
Adnan—what a great activity to do with these young students! It certainly gets them up and moving, which is helpful for squirmy, energetic youngsters! Somewhere recently I heard that students learn languages better “standing up” (perhaps this is because they aren’t hiding behind desks, but actually “doing” the language). This activity reminds me of a similar one that we practiced in Kathi Bailey’s Teaching of Speaking course. In our case, we were each given a picture that had defining characteristics (e.g., umbrellas on a beach or carousel horses). Kathi told us to not show anyone our picture. Rather, we had to go about the room talking with people to discover who had a picture that closely resembled our own (not identical pictures, but common features, so maybe one person has a red umbrella and another has a green one). It was a rather challenging exercise, but it definitely helped with conversation skills, especially with describing things, using the existential “There is/are”, and asking questions such as “Do you have an umbrella in your picture?” I think this activity could certainly be adapted to fit many L2 contexts.