I tried this with my new Year 7 class at the start of the week, and it worked well so I thought I'd share. I created a worksheet with about 10 speech bubbles, alternating from each side of the page (see picture). I gave the students a topic (in this case, getting to know you)and one sheet each and asked them to fill in the first speech bubble... then they had to get out of their seats and write something in the next speech bubble on another sheet, then another, and another and so on. It meant that they had to read what came earlier to avoid repetition and to ensure the conversation made sense.
The results? I saw students discussing the language they were using and correcting each other - and going back and correcting themselves. When something was (almost) unintelligible, one clever student used repair strategies ("Can you repeat that please?") in their written dialogue. Lots of learning took place from what was intended as just a variation on drilling the basic getting to know you language - and, what's best - the students really enjoyed it.
Great! I love the idea of making the pupils write on somebody else's sheet, so that the work on both reading and writing skills.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to test it in my class with another subject.
Thank You
Adil.