VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2, 3, 4 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 11:20:56 07/30/03 Wed
Author: Marcos Manso
Subject: TASK 13

HOW DO PEOPLE SEE YOU?

This activity leads the group to reflect about how people see them. It is a sharing and processing information type activity as similarly proposed by Littlewood (1981). In this activity, students are challenged to share information about each other and evaluate this information. This interesting activity can be used for large classes or it can be adapted for small groups, provided that the facilitator reset or apportion the time accordingly.

The teacher should explain that the objective of this activity is to allow students to use the language they are learning in a real situation as well as to show the importance to each individual of interacting with one another, and, apart from being just a bunch of students gathered in a class, they should learn to cooperate with each other by learning about each other while in pursuit of the same goal. The activity will elicit students to talk about themselves, talk about others, self-evaluate themselves, and evaluate people’s opinions about them.

The class should form a circle and each student will be given a piece of paper and a pen. Next, each pupil will write his/her name on the blank page. After a signal by the teacher, this piece of paper should be passed along to the next peer on the left. Now, each student will have 1 minute to write a word or phrase about the person whose name is on the paper. After this, the facilitator will signal again so that the paper is passed along every student till everyone has written something about that person. The group should stop writing when the paper reaches its owner. When dealing with small groups, the facilitator should adapt the activity so that each student can write more about the person whose name is written on the paper. Some of the things students can write about that person are: a positive trait of that classmate (e.g., “He’s always on time”), a negative aspect (e.g., “She’s always late”), his/her best skill or attempt in language learning (“He’s a good listener; he pays close attention to what everyone says”), a physical characteristic (“She has beautiful blond hair”), a non-physical characteristic (“He’s a little shy”), and so on. In order to save time, the teacher can previously have the headings ready and leave a blank space so that students can only fill in with their own information about their classmates. The facilitator may want to point out that students are not required to read everything people wrote about them, but only what they feel up to. However, they can comment on how they felt when they read what others had to say about them. Or they can select one or more aspects and talk about it.

One variation to this activity is that when the piece of paper gets to the next-to-last student, before arriving to its owner, students can turn pages down and each student can try to guess what people wrote about them. It will certainly be funny when students get their sheets and match their assumptions with what really people said.

Although there is no problem to be solved and students do not work together “towards a definite solution or decision” (Littlewood, 1981), this stimulating activity fulfill the functional communication activity needs once students are challenged to write about their classmates and later share with them their reactions and feelings about it. Each student will have to decide on what to write about his or her peers without being too pushy or inconvenient. Later on, each one will have to analyze what has been written about him/her, evaluate it, take this shared knowledge (some students will identify some handwriting) into account, and interact with other students. Students will have the opportunity of using their language skills, develop their communicative skills, and therefore becoming more competent not only linguistically and functionally but also socially.

Marcos Manso

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.