Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Lisa Peskar
Previous Vocabulary: This is students first year of Spanish. They have previously
studied introduction vocabulary (basic personal information and interests),
school/classroom vocabulary, and the third unit was relationships and descriptions focusing
on family, relationships, and personality/physical adjectives to describe someone.
Task Name: Celebrity Guessing Game between partner schools (video call format)
Objectives:
Students will engage in interpersonal conversation by asking highly-practiced
questions with unit vocabulary
Students will engage in interpersonal communication with students from another
culture through video call by playing a game to guess who the other is describing
In this task, students will be playing a guessing game where each student will hold up
two images of famous people from the student's own culture. The first 10 minutes will be
done in English, where the Spain students will ask questions in English and our students
will respond in English. The Spain students will ask questions to narrow down which of the
two images is the correct person that our student is describing. For example, one of our
students will hold up an image of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The Spain student will
ask questions in English, and our student partner will respond in English. This will be done
for 10 minutes, then the students will switch into Spanish for 10 minutes -- the Spain
student will be the describer, and our student will ask questions, and all will be done in
Spanish. Students will speaking for 20 minutes total with their partner in Spain.
For the famous people images, this will be chosen by the facilitating teachers (Spain
teacher and myself), to eliminate the possibility of students choosing someone
inappropriate for discussion. Student input will be solicited by teacher when putting
together images.
Students have been guided to go from more general to more specific information in
their conversation/guessing game (see student instructions below).
For homework, students will be instructed to view celebrity cards and look up information
for anyone they are not familiar with.
Activity:
Students will call their E-Pal partner using a pre-assigned username and e-mail. Students
will then begin guessing activity, first in English, then in Spanish.
Student Instructions:
While talking with your E-Pal partner today, you will be playing a guessing game. For the
first 10 minutes, you will speak in English. You have 9 sets of character cards, each set
has 2 celebrities. The star on the back will show which celebrity you will be describing to
the Spain student when they ask you questions. They will be asking questions from more
general to more specific information. After all questions are answered, the Spain student
will guess who you are describing. Repeat with character cards until 10 minutes is up.
After, the process will reverse and will be done in Spanish -- you will be asking questions
from more general to more specific, and your partner in Spain will answer in Spanish.
Lady Gaga
Selena Gomez
Ellen DeGeneres
Hillary Clinton
4
Emma Watson
JK Rowling
LeBron James
Tom Brady
Zac Efron
Justin Bieber
7
Oprah Winfrey
Beyonce
Spongebob
Shrek
Pairing our students up with native speakers from Spain gives them an important
opportunity to interact with the target culture. While this can be intimidating, organizing
their video call into a game format using vocabulary within their level will make this task
manageable and lowers the affective filter for a novice learner. Overall, interacting with a
native speaker gives them the motivation of using their language for a real-life purpose,
gives them the ability to stretch their language abilities, and also shows them the struggles
that can occur when interacting with a language barrier since both students are at the
novice level. We stated in our CALL task principles that it was also important to expose
students to authentic resources and situations, which this CALL task fulfills.
In addition, this activity provides an opportunity for cultural insights. While our students
are sharing famous people from our society, they will also learn about famous
Spanish-speakers from Spain or another country, which will provide a lense into a different
culture. We stated in our CALL task principles that incorporating culture was also important.
The activity is teacher designed, because, as stated by Furstenberg and Levet (2010),
simply connecting them does not automatically develop intercultural understanding (p.
307), when they refer to the idea of simply pairing two students up in an interpersonal
environment. I have also found when putting two students from different cultures together,
they often do not know what to say, so this activity was designed to help promote more
effective and comfortable interpersonal communication. Although this activity is not as
student-led as the Cultura approach from Furstenberg and Levet (2010), I believe that is
because their activity was done with intermediate learners at the college level, and my
interpersonal activity is appropriate given the age and language level of the students.