Tasks

Hola amig@s:

One thing I learned this week--thanks to Tea with BVP again--is that it is possible for something to be partially communicative. It turns out that a lot of what I had been doing in my classroom was only partially communicative. This is not bad, but it's definitely not as great as being fully communicative.

According to Bill Van Patten, in order for something to be fully communicative, there must be a task. Sometimes, I thought things like "oh, the task is to better get to know each other," but I am not convinced that my students really bought into that. They were simply asking and answering questions to complete the activity.

So, I have been trying my hardest to create realistic tasks for my students to show them that we are using the language for a purpose. With my 7th graders, I showed them a video in which people in Spain were asked "What do you want to do with your life?" Since my students just learned how to express their age, this video was awesome because they listed the age of all the people interviewed.  First, I asked the students to watch the video and just look for the people's ages. Then, we watched the video, and I asked them to try to get as much as they could out of the responses the people gave.

Then, I asked the students--in Spanish--if the question seemed difficult for the children, then for the teens and then for the adults. Most of the children in the video answered quickly with their job that they wanted. The teens had a more difficult time choosing what they wanted to do. The adults had a very difficult time. One guy called the question "complicado" and another woman said "What do I want to do with my life?.....I want to know what I want to do with my life." She couldn't answer it.

The students picked up on this very easily. We then discussed why the question was easier for the younger kids versus the adults. The conversation was awesome, and it was all in Spanish! Booyah! I then asked them to answer "is the question difficult for you?" We looked at the percent who said yes versus those who said no, and compared that to the ages of the people in the video.

With my sixth graders, they are learning about important people and places in Mexico City, so I had them go around and interview each other about the place/person that they would want to see most. The students took tallies of the responses their classmates said. I then had them report how many people wanted to see each place, and then we calculated the percentage of students who wanted to see each place. (Ex. 14% of the students want to see El Zócalo, etc.) So, essentially, the task for the students isn't practicing the phrase "I want to see" but rather finding out how many people want to see each place/person so that we can see the most popular place/person. When we develop tasks like this, the students see a real purpose for the language as opposed to "I am asking people what they want to see and then doing nothing with it because my teacher really only wants me to practice the language."

Keep your fingers crossed for me that I can keep developing new tasks because I don't want it to always be the percentage! Otherwise, I worry that will start to lose its meaning too.

Timothy