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TitleSpeed Dating and Self-Assessment
SourceCASLS Activity of the Week
Body

Stephanie Knight is the Language Technology Specialist for CASLS at the University of Oregon. This activity was developed in order to introduce teachers to LFO To Go, CASLS’ new mobile app designed to complement LinguaFolio Onlne.

This activity aims to develop interpersonal speaking for classes with novice-mid and novice-high learners. In completing this activity, students will engage in short conversations in a speed dating format. The goal of using this format is that students will have multiple opportunities to prove mastery of the relevant NCSSFL-ACFTL Can-Do statements to the activity. The students will do two rounds of interviews. The second time through, they will record each interview with a mobile device. At the end of the activity, they will upload their best samples to LinguaFolio Online, CASLS’s online language learning portfolio, with our mobile app, LFO to Go. These samples will serve as evidence regarding how well students achieved the relevant Can-Do statements.

Mode(s): Interpersonal Speaking, Interpretive Listening

Objectives:

  • Students will develop interpersonal speaking skills.
  • Students will engage in metacognition.
  • Students will reflect on how well that they have learned given content.

Resources: 2 student survey/reflection sheets, mobile devices

Procedure:

  1. To begin class, lead students in a brainstorm of basic questions to ask when meeting someone for the first time. Review expectations and conventions regarding the use of register in such a situation.
  2. Students will fill out one survey/reflection sheet with information about themselves. After filling out the information, they rank how well that they think that they will be able to achieve the Can-Do statements listed at the bottom of the page. This page also give a brief explanation of the activity at hand.
  3. Set the classroom up so that two rows of students are facing each other. Explain that the students will engage in speed dating with 7-10 different members of the class.  Each conversation will last for 1-1.5 minutes. At the end of the time, students will all move one spot to the right to change partners.
  4. After the students complete the first round of interviews, give global feedback to the class regarding trends that you heard. Each student should also fill out the remaining self-evaluation questions.
  5. Next, students will fill out a second survey sheet with information about an alternate personality that they have invented for the second round of speed dating. They will engage in the same self-reflection as they did for the first round.
  6. During the second round of speed dating, students should record each of their 7-10 conversations on their mobile devices.
  7. At the end of the interviews, have students upload their best interviews as evidence for the relevant can-do statements. Students will evaluate whether or not they ‘Can-do with help’ or ‘Can-do’ when they upload.
  8. Review student samples before the next class period to determine whether or not you agree with the students’ self-assessments. Use what you review to focus the following day’s lesson plans.

It is recommended that you leave the brainstorming session on the board for students who are struggling. Clearly, the students who use the board would have to answer ‘can-do with help’ when engaging in self-evaluation, but it is an appropriate mechanism to scaffold output for these students. An additional support for struggling students is to let them use their information sheets to read from when answering questions. While needing the sheet means that their capacity for spontaneous oral output is lower than that of some of their peers, it is a worthwhile support given that students are using information that they created in order to communicate.

Publishdate2015-07-27 02:15:01