These two examples are to be considered good modelling! This is how praising works and how it positively affects people’s mind.
Quizalize.com: it allows to use quizlet vocabulary list to create new quizzes. What is the difference with other quiz makers? You can decide the pass score and if the student doesn’t reach that score he/she is required to do some extra activity and retake the test.
Deck.Toys: also this one uses quizlet as a starting point and it generates different tasks. However, there is the chance to upload any material from pdf, to word to audio files. It is a good tool for Assessment for learning as it is possible to share the game on Teams and the results appear automatically on teams page.
A work in progress post that is more like a personal notebook of activities I can do in class or online.
From Vocabulary teaching | The Language Gym (gianfrancoconti.com)
Be mindful or memory decay
As you can see from the curve of forgetting rate below, the time where most of the forgetting occurs is within the first 24 hours from first processing it. Hence, this is when most of the memorization work has to be done; use as many of the above strategies as you can! During the remainder of the first week you should go over the target words over and over again, a few minutes for word-set. Better a few minutes per day than one hour once a week.
Shallow Vs deep encoding practices
In shallow processing we use repetition or matching a word to a visual cue. If you taught your students ten words using some of the www.linguascope.com very entertaining games (e.g. matching words to pictures; word dictation; spelling games), they will have performed lots of fun activities for 10-15 minutes. True. However, you will have engaged your students in 100% shallow encoding; the number of contextual cues you will have provided them with will have been very limited.
Deep processing is more likely to result in deeper learning than shallow processing because (1) it requires more cognitive investment on the part of the learner and, more importantly, (2) it creates more and stronger associations between the to-be-learnt word and existing information and words in Long-Term Memory. The latter point is of paramount importance as failure to retrieve a word (forgetting) is usually cue-dependent, i.e. the brain cannot find the required word not because it has vanished from Long-Term Memory, but because it ‘cannot find its way to it’ in the absence of effective contextual cues (physical or psychological elements that were present at the time of learning the word but are absent at the time of recall).
Some good practice for higher cognitive processing is: (1) match the target words with their antonyms and synonyms; (2) sort them into different thematic categories or in terms of size or importance; (3) use them to solve a problem (e.g. working out the meaning of a sentence), (4) fulfill a communicative goal (e.g. booking a holiday or simply interviewing a peer), (5) complete gapped sentences meaningfully, (6) create a poem or song in the target language. Your students will be processing the words in terms of meaning and will build hundreds of associations with other L2 words, other existing information in your brain (e.g. your knowledge of the world) and with many other contextual cues (e.g. their peers, the website used to book the holiday, the things that inspired the song or poem). Last but not least, they will have put serious thought into these activities; not just mindlessly matched words to images and sounds as happens in most online vocabulary learning websites (e.g. Quizlet, Memrise, etc.)
STRUCTURED PRODUCTION:
“Trapdoor” – Each person chooses an option for each sentence in their head. One starts reading the text and trying to find out the other’s choices. Each time they make a choice, the partner nods or shakes his/her head. If the choice is correct the person continues until they get it wrong. When they get it wrong, the other person has a go. The aim of the game is to finish first. I did this with my Yr10 students and they enjoyed it a lot! Enjoy and don’t forget to feedback!
“Speaking Ladders”
“Sentence Chaos”
“Tangled translation”
“Running translations”
“Pyramid translation”
Narrow translation:
Sample Narrow Translation Texts – The words in bold indicate the instances in which the texts differ from one another
It consists of a track made up of about 30 cases (see picture below). Each case contains a to-be-translated chunk that the students will have practised to death prior to the game. The chunks become increasingly difficult as the game unfolds. Figure 2 below, shows an example I used last week with a year 9 French mixed-ability class
No Snakes No Ladders (NSNL)
Figure 2 – Sample No-Snakes-No-ladders game
The rules are as follows: in groups of three students (2 player + 1 referee) or five (2 teams of two players and one referee), players take turn in rolling a dice. Whichever case the player/team lands based on their dice score, they will have 10-15 seconds to translate the relative sentence(s) into the target language orally. The referee will then tell the players (with the help of the answer sheet) if their translation is correct. If the translation is correct they will have another go and casting the dice and will advance to the next case where they will have to translate the next sentence and so on.
Oral communicative drills-
Students take turn translating questions/answers whilst a third student, who has the target language version of each card, listens critically and provide corrective feedback
Sentence stealers
Alternative
Provide students with a piece of paper where they have one sentence in the TL and a its translation. Each student will have a different sentence with the grammar and vocabulary they have studied. When they go around the class they will need to translate into the TL other people’s sentences. If they succeed, they will get the paper.
Mind reading (good as a starter for online learning)
Step1 – Write a set of target chunks on the board;
Step2 – Write secretly one on a mini-board;
Step 3- Choose chunks containing sounds you know they find phonologically challenging and/or containing the target sounds;
Step 4 – Ask the students to guess the hidden chunk reading out any one of the sentences on and reward correct answers.
Picture 3 illustrates an example of this game, designed to recycle the same sentences practised in the ‘Sentence stealer’.
Picture 3 – Mind reading game
In the student-led version, two children – who play against each other – secretly write on their mini-whiteboards three or more sentences (taken from those displayed on the classroom screen or whiteboard). They then take turns at guessing each other’s sentences.
The something game
Step 1 – Sit the students in pairs, back to back.
Step2 – Give Student 1 sheet A and Student 2 sheet B. Both sheets have different version of the same list of sentences; the sentences which are gapped on student A’s sheet are complete on students’ B sheet and vice versa (see picture below).
Step 3 – Students take turns in reading one gapped sentence each. As they read their gapped sentences they say ‘something’ (or ‘algo’ in Spanish) to signal the presence of a gap (note: each gap corresponds to a key target chunk). When Student B hears student A say ‘something’ s/he will have to read the whole sentence including the missing chunk out twice, whilst his/her opponent writes it down and vice versa.
Step 4 – At the end of the game the students compare the two sheets to see who was more accurate.
Picture 5 – Two students playing the ‘Something game’ (courtesy of Dylan Vinales and Global Innovative Language Teachers)
Spot the difference
Student A and B are given two nearly identical texts which differ only in terms of 8-10 words. As Student A reads aloud his text, Student B must spot the differences in his text.
This task combines reading aloud and listening whilst eliciting thorough processing, as Student B must really pay close attention to each and every word being read aloud to them.
FOR STARTERS / BRAIN BREAK / PLENARIES
Give pupils sentences that they have to alter in some way to make their own.
Dans ma ville il y a une gare. – transform this into a sentence with 10 words.
No me gusta el inglés porque es aburrido – say something nice
En mi familia hay cinco personas – say it in a different way
No hay una piscina en mi casa – Change this while keeping the sentence on the same topic. You may not use any words from the original apart from “casa” and “piscina”.
With remote learning gibing feedback can be quite challenging. I found a couple of tools which I would suggest.
Blooket.com
+ Very similar to kahoot but activities are more engaging.
+ Very useful if combined with quizlet.
-The free version is quite complete. The only downslide is that you cannot organize your activities into folders, which can be quite challenging if you have many classes. However, if you label activities clearly, there shouldn’t be any problem.
I made a tutorial video, which is the first time for me, so please be patient as I am not a pro (but I will soon be :))
+ Amazing tools for exit tickets but also for instant feedback.
+ It is free
+ you can set your classes
+ You can work in real time or assign homework
+ At the end of each session you can download the grades
A short tutorial video of “quickFire“
Happy Knowledge 