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TitleConducting an Interview
SourceCASLS Activity of the Week
Body

Renée Marshall is a Curriculum Consultant at CASLS

This activity has many parts: creating questions, interviewing a partner, and writing a brief biographical article. You can place a main focus on any or all of these three parts. I like to emphasize the listening aspect of this activity: be a good listener and ask clarifying questions and follow-up questions based on what your partner says. Listen well and do not write down every single word your partner says, but rather key words or phrases to help jog your memory when it comes time to write the article. I usually use this interactive listening task towards the beginning of the year or semester in order for students to get to know each other better. You may choose to post or display somehow the article and picture that students create based on their interviews so that everyone gets a chance to get to know each person. This activity could be considered a speaking to writing activity (see What Every Teacher Should Know about Heritage Language Learning from June 1, 2015, InterCom) that heritage and non-heritage students can do together, learning about each other and collaborating together to take spoken speech from the interview and present it in a written article.

Objective(s):

Students will be able to write questions for an interview task. Students will be able to listen to spoken information and pick out and record salient key words and phrases that they will use later in a writing task. Students will be able to ask clarifying and follow-up questions based on information given. Students will be able to write a short biographical article based on the information gleaned from the interview.

Resources: Conducting an Interview handout in English and French

Procedure:

  1. Have students partner up. I like to do this activity near the beginning of the year or semester as a "get to know each other better" activity. It can be useful to have students pair up with someone they don't know yet or don't know very well yet.
  2. Pass out the Conducting an Interview handout to all students. Briefly go over the instructions for the entire activity with the class, and then have them start on #1: creating their questions. Questions can be difficult in a second language; walk around and offer help/suggestions as needed and appropriate. You could also address common mistakes to the whole class.
  3. Now have students meet with their partner. This can be done in class or outside class. They complete #2 and #3 on the handout. Be sure to let students know the focus here is listening to their partner's responses, asking clarifying or follow-up questions, and writing down key words and phrases to help them remember what their partner said.
  4. After the interview, each student will write the biography article on his or her partner (#4 on handout). They will share this along with the picture they drew of their partner with their partner and also the whole class (#5 on handout).

Notes:

1. You can adjust this activity for different levels: Make the number of questions they ask smaller or greater; require certain questions or types of questions (i.e. based on a theme); write the directions in the target language or in L1; require they write a longer or shorter biographical article after the interview; provide a model biographical article; provide a list of helpful words and verbs; etc.

2. Also important here is register: in the example questions on the handout provided I use informal French. Depending on your class and your target language, you and the students can decide if the questions and the interview should be carried out in your target language's formal speech or informal speech. For French, for example, if it's a group of high school students, many of whom know each other and are the same age, perhaps informal speech is most appropriate (tu-form). If it's an adult class with students of varying ages who do not know each other, perhaps formal speech is most appropriate (vous-form). Or, in keeping with the theme of interviewing someone for the newspaper, a news reporter would most likely conduct an interview in formal speech (vous-form), unless they knew the person well (tu-form). The written article, however, which is geared for a news article, should be in a more formal, written register. This activity could be a good chance to practice transitioning between informal speech to a written register, pointing out the differences between the two and showing how the language must be adjusted to fit the task and the audience.

Publishdate2015-06-22 02:15:01