Brandl gives you what he calls guidelines
for implementing communicative activities.
Make the goal clear from the beginning.
Yes, we try to make it clear, but it's your job as the teacher
to also make sure they understand the goal.
Oh boy, how do you do this?
There's a bullet point, involve all participants equally.
Okay, well you can do the best you can, right, but you've already said mismatched groups.
Part of that is designing the design so that it's distributed.
What they have to do is distributed, so they--
you force them to communicate but you cannot force people to change their personalities.
You're gonna have to-- that's a given, so there'll be shy people
and they will remain shy throughout your class.
That's okay.
Make sure students are adequately prepared.
I can say that for all of the--
the French examples, they had had all that material, they really had.
We knew that by the time they got there.
Provide clear instructions and examples.
Every one of our activities had an example, a model.
And by the way, providing clear instructions, we had to rewrite these activities because,
you know, you think the instructions are clear but they're clear to you. in the classroom, so. 00:01:16.005 They're not clear to 30 people in the classroom, so.
>> I did have a question about that.
There are first year French and the instructions are in French.
>> They start out in English and I can't remember what chapter,
but they go into French, right.
>> 'Cause all of the ones that we read here were in French.
>> Yeah, so that was in chapter 5.
That's actually in chapter 4.
So right, after 3 months, then they're going all into French.
So we're trying to use very simple French to talk about these.
Make an effort to mix groups, that's really important because, you know,
how many times do you just always end up with the same partner?
And typically you do this according to proximity, so you two,
I do that all the time in my class.
You and you and you and you and you and you, okay.
[ Laughter ]
>> Assign activities that are relevant and interesting to students.
We've already said some of these are relevant and some of these may not be.
Circulate, circulate, circulate, I think Brandl said it once, I said it 3 times.
When I observe, you know, it's interesting
because I said these are really student controlled and so you step back and let them,
but you've gotta circulate, okay.
And teach group interaction skills, and this is the biggest point.
This, they break down.
They always break down, so you need to teach as part of the activity how to say
"what did you say, what's that word mean," in other words in the--
in going all the way back to communicative competence, that last competence was strategic.
That is one of the missing pieces and they are not good at that.
And you need-- instead of the linguistics, the linguistic scaffold should also include phrases
for helping them strategize, have strategic competence.
So every opportunity-- and I really believe this every class, you say up on the board,
now if you don't know what the word is, this is how you ask.
How do you say this, what's the synonym, okay,
and then hold them accountable for completing the task on time.
"You have one minute!", Okay.