Greetings, Level Up Villagers! If you’re considering having your language classes participate in one of the best introductory virtual exchanges, “The People in Our Lives,” then you’re going to want to do a little bit of preliminary thinking on how best to set your students up. This way, not only do they approach the course with confidence and the tools they need to accomplish their tasks—but they experience the exchange meaningfully, as well!
Talk the Talk
Vocabulary: it’s essential, the building blocks of language. And, if you’ve matched your students up according to their abilities for this Level 1 Explorer course, finding the right words to express themselves is where they’re going to struggle the most. But this isn’t your first rodeo, is it? So let’s review strategies in order to get your students ready with the words they want to use.
First of all, limit the scope of what they want to say. This sounds counterintuitive, but in reality, your students do themselves no favors when they think they’re going to be able to express themselves as fluently in a second language as they do in their native tongue. So, instead of answering their queries on, “How do you say affable?” or “Como se dice stubborn en inglés?” remind them that they should stick to the vocabulary they know.
Adjectives is the name of the game here, folks. Your pupils are going to want to describe the people in their lives, and they’re going to want to talk about the great qualities these folks have. Of course, that’s fine, but keep the bumpers on and always bring it back to your introductory lessons—the stuff of textbooks. Usually, we equip beginner language learners with basic physical descriptors, general personality traits, and words to detail relationships. While these details might seem prosaic, it’s worthwhile to remind your students that this is what they know and to stick with it.
Likely, an overview of activities, pastimes, and the verbs that go with them, will prepare your students for their first few videos, as well. Whether you’ve gotten to that lesson or not, as ‘hobbies’ can often appear later in language curriculums, you can solicit from your students a word map of pastimes that interest them and prepare a mini vocabulary list based on these. Sports, games, and creative outlets will probably suffice, and focus your students on the activities they do with other people so that they start practicing vocabulary that they’ll actually use in their videos.
In this way, you’ll have prepared for them a very simple formula they can use to describe the people who are important to them: they can systematically go from person to person, describing their appearance and personality, explaining the basic nature of their relationship, and then how they spend their time together!
Putting People First
While your students’ videos themselves will likely be quite basic—given their nominal vocabulary at this point in their language learning—that doesn’t mean that their relationships with the folks they talk about are! Anything but! However, expressing what people mean to us can be challenging—even in our native language!
So, to squeeze a little more meaning out of the activity, encourage your students to reflect on the people in their life, and drill down into the nature of their relationships with a little brainstorming exercise. You can model this in the native language first with a quick presentation of the people who matter to you, and an eloquent (yet still simple) explanation of why they’re important to you, and this could very much set the tone for your students to do the same in their videos.
But they don’t know enough Spanish to get philosophical, you say!
Yes, but you can help them to use their basic linguistic skills to accomplish great things by showing them how much they can already express with what they have. For example, think of how philosophically profound and yet linguistically simple a description like this can be:
Maria is my mother. She is short and has brown hair and brown eyes. Thanks to her, I have brown hair and brown eyes. She is kind, generous, and happy. On Sundays, we talk, eat, walk in the park, and go shopping. She is important to me because I know how to read and talk thanks to her. I also go to school and love reading because she thinks these things are important. I love animals because she lets me have a dog.
There’s a lot that can be expressed in just your basic Chapters 1–3 vocabulary, and while your students might be reaching for more profound thoughts, showing them the poetic value in simple statements full of context will empower them to use the tools they’ve already learned.
But first, you’ll need them to think about why these people are important to them. Giving them statements to complete that start with provocative setups can help. Offer them a worksheet where they can describe the people, and then complete phrases like:
- From this person, I get ___________________.
- I have ___________________ because of this person.
- I love ___________________ because of this person.
- I do ___________________ because this person does it, too.
- ______________ is important because it is important to this person as well.
And so on.
We often don’t stop and think about the important effects of our loved ones on us, and on our formation, so a thought exercise like this will not only sharpen their language skills, it may even bring about more gratitude!
Looking into Your Reflections
Reflections are a critical part of every Level Up Village course, but I sometimes find them frustrating because it’s when my students either come up dry on substance or paint with too broad of strokes. None of this is to say that students don’t have thoughts or opinions on their interactions with their partners abroad; many times they are doubted into thinking their thoughts are worth anything, or they’re too confident in generalizations.
To combat this, I would suggest preparing them with some information about the culture they’re about to encounter. Have students research the country of their exchange partners, focusing on common greetings and social norms. Most textbooks have short readings in simpler language that talk about these, so you can warm them up with a short, one-page reading. Then, facilitate a discussion about what friendship means in different cultures. Try and find resources on YouTube of bloggers talking about their cultures, and if it’s at a level you think your students will understand, use videos in the target language with subtitles also in that language. This way, you’re strengthening their listening skills, and giving them the option to read as well.
Having an authentic voice expressing an opinion about how relationships operate in a certain culture can really ease a discussion. In the simplest cases, a student can go back to something they heard or read and repeat it verbatim to express the idea that, “look, it’s just like we read before doing the exchange!” However, if at all possible, it actually amplifies the possibility of real and meaningful cultural comparison by having students negotiate how well their international partners actually proved, or challenged, these notions.
In Sum
So, don’t sleep on the prep work–if you’re considering having your language classes participate in one of the best introductory virtual exchanges, “The People in Our Lives,” think ahead and plan for it! Even if there’s a summer between now and the coursework, you’ll definitely want your students to get warmed up before they jump into this great Level Up Village course!
