This is from Diane Neubauer:
Hi Ben – I lost the place on the PLC where you asked for a description of reports. I think they would be good for people learning CI, too. Feel free to use the idea and share.
– Diane
Reports to start the beginning of classes: I heard this idea from Terry Waltz, but I’m sure I’m doing them differently. I often take volunteers, and have sometimes assigned topics to a pair of students. Either way, the idea is to be brief. What I do is usually:
– Every Mon.-Thur. I begin class with topic reports in L2 on subjects that tend to have long lists of words – especially nouns – that are tedious to teach, yet useful. If someone had to include terms from a textbook with topical lists, I think reports might solve the problem over the course of the year. (On Friday we spend a couple minutes on quotes on Second Language Acquisition with brief discussion. It’s an English discussion and a chance to reflect on the process.)
Topic reports I have include:
– Date, day of the week, time
– Weather
– Fashion (clothes & colors)
– Sports (sports, scores, win/lose)
– Lunch (foods and drinks)
– Celebrity gossip (boy- and girlfriend, break up, marriage, etc.)
– Events (entertainment like movies, games, concerts)
I could see a list of classes, test, quiz, homework, easy/hard being another potential topic, especially if someone has to match up with textbook sequencing.
Each “report” has a section of a Word document that gets shown on screen. I list words related to the topic next to their English meaning. Each report has maybe 20 words available, both those lists of nouns but a few adjectives, too. I don’t do any but the date & weather reports every day. Some classes suggest which; some classes just get told which we’ll do.
While students give a sentence to “report,” I point to the words they use so everyone can understand. I ask a few questions but not thorough circling. Partly, this is because the reps come over time across the year, and partly because it becomes too boring for the students.
Using reports, my Chinese 1 class acquired numbers 0-100 within the first couple months of school. I led the date/day/time with them and encouraged them to volunteer to give the report when they felt ready. That happened within a month of school; now everyone can say it together. I add a report as the 1’s seem ready for more. The 3s and 4s have a more detailed list of terms available to them, and fewer basic terms once I figured out which they had already acquired. Sometimes I leave the L2 term but drop the English once the students have it.