Verb Slam Activity

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14 thoughts on “Verb Slam Activity”

  1. Thanks, Ben.
    Did you mean verbs or words (as in high-frequency words) when you wrote “One list has 100 verbs and the other, for upper levels, has 200”?

    1. For a short while we were calling something similar (maybe same thing) the Power Verb Activity. . . I sometimes pull a high-frequency off the verb wall, show an image that represents the verb, decide on a gesture, and then target it for 5 minutes.

      1. Eric this originated with you and then Polly Fuller named it the Verb Slam because she was having success with it and that name stuck. Thanks for that reminder. I knew it was you and I will go correct that credit statement in my book forthwith.

    2. Thank you for that important catch, Nathaniel. It is my mistake. I should have said “words”. This is a very critical point because in DPS we don’t hand a list of verbs/verbal structures to our new teachers to teach. They work from that word list (it’s in the Primers). Clarity is important here. I will see Diana on Monday and bring this up with her. Personally, I think handing a list of words to a teacher, words like “a” or “man” is kind of weird because I think “a man” is going to probably occur sometime in the first semester of a first year class in the vast amounts of CI that we offer. So let me clear this up with Diana, and Joseph if you are reading this you know the answer so put your coffee down and help us out here.

      1. I looked around in the Primers for that DPS word list but did not find it…I’m sorry if it’s obvious, but could you give the name of the document?

  2. I’m sorry to be asking questions about this so far after it was posted, but it seems to be a crucial activity that I’d really like to nail at the start of the year.
    How can you be confident that every student has “conquered” the verb? Are we talking about conquering the third person singular form? Would it be advisable to focus on other tenses in upper levels? (I teach French 1-5.) This is especially confusing to me for irregular verbs. For some reason I feel that my students never conquer even the basic est vs. a.
    I really appreciate your guidance on this. Thank you!

    1. Don’t be sorry! It’s a good thing when topics resurface. I’m glad you reminded me of this.
      Anyway, here’s my 2 cents (where’s the cents symbol anymore?).
      1) “How can you be confident that every student has ‘conquered’ the verb?”
      Maybe don’t think about it as “conquering.” It’s just one more way for them to hear the language, to establish meaning and get a bunch of reps. It all builds and you use the verbs in all different ways over time, and you assess however and whenever you choose, but don’t think you have to assess at the end of each VSA before you move on.
      2) “Are we talking about conquering the third person singular form?”
      When I have done this or something like it (level 1), I have used first, second, and third person as I circle. I could see using first and second plural, too, in time.
      3) “This is especially confusing to me for irregular verbs. For some reason I feel that my students never conquer even the basic est vs. a.”
      I wondered about this when I started teaching French a couple years ago. Those little words are really confusing for them out of context. We think of them as basic, but they are tricky. Action verbs are way easier.
      I once felt frustrated by this, not knowing it was normal, and grabbed a pencil and did an impromptu VSA-type-thing (before I’d heard about VSA) with “avoir” using first, second, and third singular present. The kids were totally into it and attentive. Did they all acquire it that day? No, but it helped I think, and I could have done it more often and with other verbs too (it was my first year of French, though, and I was ALL over the place trying every kind of CI I could). I hope to do more of it this year.
      4) “Would it be advisable to focus on other tenses in upper levels?”
      I only teach Level 1, but we use present, imperfect, passé composé, and futur proche in various CI activities. I have not done VSA in anything but the present.
      I hope this is somewhat helpful, Kelly.

    2. Are we talking about conquering the third person singular form?
      One way to think of this is whether you are thinking about spelling or listening/speaking. Take the word “to see.” Aurally, it is basically a bunch of [vwa] sounds with a nasally [yo] and a [yeah] (nous and vous, respectively) thrown in for good measure. So the kids will probably get the notion that [vwa] means see/sees. You will have to keep coming back to some form of [vwa] for a long term memory to be built.
      If you are working with true beginners (no previous French), VSA is an intro to a verb. Your goal is to create a body-sound-meaning association and work with the sound-meaning in a meaningful context. You are taking an out of bounds word and moving it in-bounds.
      I believe that by acquiring it we are talking about our students understanding the word when they hear it. It is comprehensible input at this point, although there are still different processing speeds for different students.

  3. Yes, Ruth, thank you!
    Ben writes: “That is the main function of VSA, to get a verb wall built in our classrooms that has on it only verbs that our students have full command over.”
    I guess I’m concerned with when the verb gets to be written on the verb wall, indicating that students have “full command over” it (and does that mean the students can recognize it or use it?). I know it’s just a gesture, but I get the feeling that the symbolism is meaningful. And is this expected to happen after a five-minute verb slam? One verb per class/day?
    Thanks again for your input.

    1. Some ideas, Kelly, related to your questions: You’ll want to sense your students’ comprehension, rather than be led by expectations for when they’ll get (comprehension) or begin to use (speech) the verbs. Teaching to their eyes helps; comprehension check questions (and sometimes asking for the English meaning) help; and how quickly and automatically they respond also helps.
      It seems to me that each group of students is different, so no certain time that it’ll click can be precisely predicted. Also, as a pattern, it seems that some words take a short time and some seem to need a lot more time and reps.
      Caveat: I haven’t done VSA exactly. I think I would add the verb to the poster after doing VSA at least for several minutes and sensing high student comprehension. But I would still pause & point in using that verb later on. (I have a poster of verbs that relate especially to class instructions/activities, and I pause & point at it all year when I say them.) I think what Ben may mean by “full command over” may be in contrast to a list of verbs on the wall that have never been heavily introduced to students. So the idea is for a poster of familiar verbs, ones heard in many reps and contexts, not unknown verbs.

      1. From targeting a verb (or any language structure) don’t expect mastery in acquisition and definitely not in language use.
        We can look to 50 years of SLA to upgrade our expectations as to the effects of instruction.
        Even meaning-based input instruction may (or may not) lead to acquisition of verb inflections. Students (especially beginners) are likely to use other processing strategies (context, other content words in the input, etc.) other than processing the verb inflection, in order to get the meaning. Getting processed is the first step if acquisition is to happen (input -> intake).
        The inflections for a particular verb may be internalized, but also realize that it doesn’t mean students can generalize to new verbs. That takes a while and is probably based on implicit statistical patterning, e.g. how would a student know how to conjugate the nonsense verb “skrive”? Well, after internalizing enough of the inflections for similar verbs (drive, arrive, etc.).
        Now, you may be able to expect mastery of recognition of the verb stem. Despite being an unpopular notion, some aspects of what it means to “know” a word (e.g. spoken form and meaning) can be acquired with either incidental or deliberate learning. But those aspects of knowledge represent only partial acquisition of the word.

        1. Eric’s comments point out that I hadn’t recalled most of you are thinking about conjugation as a big issue with this. Chinese doesn’t conjugate, tense, or have subject-verb agreements, so verbs are clear & simple. Even so, I still don’t assume students master any from something like a VSA-like activity.

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