One chunk at a time

Image: printster.co.uk

There was a game I used to play with classes once they had got to the stage of being able to string sentences together to some degree. This was usually from about Y9, but some could do so earlier. The game will be familiar to you perhaps. It involves making up a story one word at a time. In one version, you work around the class, one student at a time, each student adding a word to a sentence so that it gradually forms a narrative. If the sentence has come to a natural end, a student can say "full stop".

With younger classes the vocab and grammar range is limited, of course, but the game still works as students are forced to retrieve from memory, under time pressure words which make semantic and syntactic sense. It's a great game, by the way, for getting students to notice when the grammar has gone wrong. Of course, since the students are making up the story themselves, the narrative can take amusing twists and turns, becoming absurd - which always appeals to classes.

On reflection, I could have played the game a little differently, with students not doing one word art a time, but one chunk (phrase) at a time. This would better reflect the way we retrieve language from memory and chain phrases together to make meaningful utterances.

If you like to work with a chunking/sentence builder approach, the game makes particular sense, since at a later point in a lesson cycle, when learners are ready, they can recycle the chunks they learned in previous lessons. But even if you work in other more 'traditional', hybrid ways (doing communicative work through comprehensible texts and pictures, for example), you will have been favouring the use of chunked language over isolated words. The game is a perfect fit with the TPRS approach, of course, with its emphasis on listening, speaking and stories.

Just in case you aren't clear what's involved, it might go something like this. Remember that the students make up the narrative themselves.

Student A  Le weekend dernier

B  je suis allé(e)

C  au parc

D  avec mes ami(es

E  point (full stop)

F  Soudain

G  j'ai vu

H  un énorme dinosaure

I   avec on long cou

J  derrière mon ami(e).

K point.

You get the idea. The sillier, the better really. But even recycling mundane chunks is good.

There is a lot going on with this game at various levels: morphological, syntactic, semantic and at a discourse level (longer stretches). Students can land their peers in trouble by throwing in conjunctions and adverbials (and, but, then, a moment later etc). You could also allow students to throw in individual words: j'ai vu un énorme dinosaure/ multicolore/et/beau. Dare I also mention the buzz phrase retrieval practice?

In addition, this is a good fluency-building task since it demands quick retrieval at speed.

A potential downside, when played with a whole class, is that only one person can talk at a time, but if the content is fun, the rest of the class will be getting good listening input. Once modelled, some classes could play the game in small groups. You might also be concerned that it puts unnecessary pressure on individuals to produce language ('forced output'). But if you play the game when you know a class is ready it's really fine when done in the right spirit. You also have the option of allowing students to 'pass' if they are stuck.

If you think your class is not ready to play a game like this (i.e. they don't have the stock of language needed in long-term memory), you could play a simplified version by supplying lots of chunks to choose from, either displayed on the board, or on a printed sheet. But this takes away a major advantage of the game, which is its creativity and potential for amusement.

There is, of course, a natural written follow-up to be done here. As a homework or classroom writing task, students could write down from memory a version of what was done orally, probably with some scaffolding on the board.