søndag 27. oktober 2019

Vocabulary training with role-play


My name is Anette, and I teach Norwegian, Spanish and English at a secondary school in Oslo, Norway. This year I am a student at OsloMet, and one of our assignments is to write a blog entry about a vocabulary training project we have conducted in our classrooms. My 9th-grade students have been working with gustar (to like) in Spanish, so I decided to do a lesson where we focused on what we like to eat in my English class. To adapt to each student's levels, I made a role play with character cards. The fictive setting was that the students were at a conference where they had just met their table companions for dinner in the evening. One student would have the role of the waiter, and the rest as guests. Making characters this way can make it easy for the teacher to adapt to each student's level without making homogenous groups. This way the students who struggle with vocabulary get a role they can master, and learn from their peers, all at the same time. In addition to their characters, I made a vocabulary list of words and phrases one would need at a restaurant that I placed in the middle of each group table. This way, the students were able to build new sentences - putting the “words to work” (Thornbury, 2002). Creating a case based role play like this force the pupils to make decisions about which words to use, which helps the pupils move words into their long-term memory (Thornbury, 2002, 93). I chose to make them a character each so that they would relate personally to the activities listed on their role cards, and they could be creative in their conversations if they chose to use more words from the voluntary list on the table. The oral communication competence aims in the English subject curriculum after year 10 “choose and use different listening and speaking strategies that are suitable for the purpose” and “express oneself fluently and coherently, suited to the purpose and situation” are covered in this task (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2013).

Vocabulary training with role-play

My name is Anette, and I teach Norwegian, Spanish and English at a secondary school in Oslo, Norway. This year I am a student at ...