View Content #27800

This month, we have explored Mixed-Reality Complex Learning Scenarios (MRCLSs), including a general description, explanation of the elements in MRCLSs, and ways to teach with MRCLSs.  This week we look at how to create them yourself. 

Key to the creation of MRCLSs is the intentional integration of learning objectives with a meaningful narrative, language outcomes, and meaningful tasks that lead to deep thinking and language learning.

A meaningful narrative is anything that catches learners’ attention and matches the intended learning outcomes. When coming up with a narrative scenario, one of the best tricks is to consider is popular storylines from books and films. Spy stories, explorer adventures, daring escapes, space explorations, critical science discoveries, time travel, and robberies always make for engaging experiences. In this week’s Activity of the Week, we showcase a weather puzzle that is critical to solving a spy-theft drama.

Language outcomes should focus on the key language functions with explicit attention to the vocabulary, structures, strategies, and pragmatics key to interpretation and production. This week’s activity targets the key functions of a weather report, including temperatures and making predictions.

Finally, meaningful tasks can be created to incorporate these outcomes in your chosen narrative. To make engaging MRCLSs, it is fundamental the language tasks and puzzles match how language would be used in the scenario in real life. For example, in our accompanying spy narrative, the weather report is used to determine a code to figure out where the other agent is. As such, it has a language purpose and a narrative purpose.

We hope you enjoy creating your own experiences for your language learning context!