'Change one thing'

I've been working a lot on 'do-now' style starters for frenchteacher.net. One format I've chosen is sets of PowerPoint slides to get students to understand and manipulate language at their level. In the example below called 'Change one thing' students see slides with four sentences each. Their job is to change one element of the sentence. This gets them to understand the sentences, then retrieve from memory an element to insert of their choice. 

There are numerous ways you could exploit a set of slides like this as a starter to a lesson. Here are a few: 

• Just do the task 'as is', with students writing down their sentences on paper or on a mini whiteboard. Give a suitable time limit to add a sense of urgency and encourage quick, fluent retrieval. 
• To add some stretch, tell them in the time limit to do as many examples as possible. For each slide get students to suggest as many variations to each sentence in pairs. Just keep an eye on the pairs to check they are working in the target language. 
• If you think it's valuable for the class, make sure you read aloud each set of sentences. Do choral repetition if the class's phonics (reading aloud) skill is shaky. 
• Get students to translate each sentence. 
• Add extra challenge by doing variation on the first task, e.g. students change one element and add two (or more) new ones. Or just get students to add an extra element rather than replace one. 

Maybe you can think of others. 

I like this sort of starter for a few reasons: 

• It uses comprehensible input and the activity is all, or nearly all, in the target language. I say 'nearly all' because you may use some translation to check for meaning. 
• Students may need to manipulate grammar as well as retrieve vocabulary. 
• The task involves the use of connected, chunked language rather than isolated words. My preference is always to chunk language where possible. Providing connected language as far as possible means that comprehension and production of connected language is enhanced. Think of the idea of 'transfer' here, or specifically TAP (Transfer-Appropriate Processing). 
• There is a strong degree of student choice of language, not in terms of the task, but in terms of the language being retrieved. 
• The task is very clear and structured for students. 

This type of task can be part of your 'fluency' strand in the curriculum, notably if you include time constraints. (Recall that Paul Nation includes fluency building as one of his four major strands in a curriculum. Fluency doesn't just refer to speech, it also means cognitive fluency, the ability to quickly retrieve and deploy language.)

Students are doing retrieval practice from long-term memory. (We didn't call it this in the past, but it is fashionable to describe it in these terms and it's important to be aware of how memory works. Retrieval build memory.) 

 Downsides? 

The last previous point is a positive but also potentially a negative. Students will only retrieve what they easily can, so the 'testing effect' is limited. The level of 'desirable difficulty' is questionable. Is this important? Well.... I'd rather students were regularly recycling known language to strengthen their memory than being asked for language they just don't know. 

The larger downside is the 'drill and kill'-like nature of the task. Or is it drill and skill? (The jury remains somewhat split on this.) It's clear that this is far from a 'communicative' activity, with a wider goal to attain or resemblance to a real life task. There is no information gap. Students need to buy into the reasons for the activity and 'play the game'. Does every language learning task have to be communicative in the somewhat strict sense the term is often applied? I think there is communication going on here in a broader sense.

Another objection might be that the sentence meanings are not inherently very interesting. We are talking pretty random meanings here, although the examples can be finely tuned to your class's prior knowledge, building on existing schemas. So overall this is a task that may not be for you or every class. You might like your cup of tea to be stronger.

Is it enjoyable? Is it fun? Well, you can make it spicier by the choice of sentences, bringing in silly examples, characters, references to the class itself. You can also encourage students to be humorous or absurd in their choices.

Activities like these can be part of your full repertoire of task.

See what you think! The slides contain French but the idea is clear, definitely not original, and easy to adapt.