Strategies and Activities for Foreign Language Instruction
Deborah Blaz's book Differentiated Instruction: A Guide for Foreign Language Teachers includes many rich and diverse activities for foreign language learning. Read below for a strategy and an activity for learning new vocabulary.
Use Gestures
Studies done on people with brain injuries after a serious accident have found that words may often be retrieved when they are associated with a gesture, because they were stored in two areas of the brain instead of just one. Making the gesture of writing recalled the word “pen”—and try saying “castanets” without making the clicking motion! I like to practice verbs especially by associating gestures with them (a good Total Physical Response Storytelling technique), and I often see my students making gestures during a test. If they ask me how to say a verb they already know, all I have to do is make the gesture to remind them of it.
Battleship
This is played exactly like the board game, but on a piece of paper. Students fill in four “ships” in blanks in a grid their partner cannot see. Then they take turns guessing the various spaces by saying (or writing) the correct answer for the space they wish to guess. For example, in the example below, if one wanted to guess the top left space, one would say “je rougis.” If what was said is correct, the partner replies with whether that space was a hit (part of a ship there), a miss, (nothing there), or a “sunk” (the final portion of a ship to be hit). If they have a hit, they may continue guessing; a miss response ends the turn, and someone else takes over. The winner is the first to sink all the partner’s ships.
Click to download a sample PDF of a Battleship board.
Click to read sample chapters of Differentiated Instruction: A Guide for Foreign Language Teachers by Deborah Blaz.
Use Gestures
Studies done on people with brain injuries after a serious accident have found that words may often be retrieved when they are associated with a gesture, because they were stored in two areas of the brain instead of just one. Making the gesture of writing recalled the word “pen”—and try saying “castanets” without making the clicking motion! I like to practice verbs especially by associating gestures with them (a good Total Physical Response Storytelling technique), and I often see my students making gestures during a test. If they ask me how to say a verb they already know, all I have to do is make the gesture to remind them of it.
Battleship
This is played exactly like the board game, but on a piece of paper. Students fill in four “ships” in blanks in a grid their partner cannot see. Then they take turns guessing the various spaces by saying (or writing) the correct answer for the space they wish to guess. For example, in the example below, if one wanted to guess the top left space, one would say “je rougis.” If what was said is correct, the partner replies with whether that space was a hit (part of a ship there), a miss, (nothing there), or a “sunk” (the final portion of a ship to be hit). If they have a hit, they may continue guessing; a miss response ends the turn, and someone else takes over. The winner is the first to sink all the partner’s ships.
Click to download a sample PDF of a Battleship board.
Click to read sample chapters of Differentiated Instruction: A Guide for Foreign Language Teachers by Deborah Blaz.
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