Tag: pragmatics

Resource: Appropriate Repetition

Marc Jones / / Materials

Hi, just a short post this time. I’ve uploaded a resource that I made a while ago. It works best with group classes. It’s a game-like activity. The students beat the teacher if they use all the strips (not crossed out) to get repetition but appropriately and not just grunting or commanding.
The top row of crossed out words and phrases are common among Japanese learners. Feel free to change it up. Give me some credit if you make a remix/localization and let me know and I’ll link to it here.
Anyway, the sheet is here as a PDF and Word document to edit.

Activity – Backchannel Bingo

Marc Jones / / Listening, Materials, Speaking

Here’s a conversation analysis task for learners which might form baseline information for teaching ‘active listening’, backchannelling and body language. It was inspired by this post by Olya Sergeeva (hat tip to @eilymurphy) that I didn’t have time to implement fully so tweaked to my own needs.
Update (10 October 2016): There are two leveled sheets, one for elementary/pre-intermediate (MS Word or PDF) and one for intermediate levels and up (MS Word or PDF).
One student observes two or more students having a conversation about a given topic or one of their own choosing, checking the boxes each time one of the conversation events occurs. Use a set time for this; I’d say 3 minutes at least and certainly less than 10.
At the end, observing students report which boxes were not checked. This can then be taught/coached. You could collect the information from the sheets and repeat the activity after a certain number of classes to monitor improvement (or lack thereof).
I hope this is useful. If you do try it, let me know how it went in the comments.