My previous post called 10 nifty starters for language lessons had a lot of views in a short time (thank you Twitter and Facebook), so I thought teachers might appreciate some ideas for plenaries - ends of lessons which round up or review language used during the lesson. You could add these to your current repertoire.
To begin with, I don't think for one moment that every lesson needs a starter or a plenary. Hopefully the days are gone when three part, four part, or X part lessons seemed prescribed. But there is some sense in using the start of a lesson to review language used in the previous lesson(s) and there is some sense in giving a lesson plan some extra shape and clear purpose for students by including a plenary. In reality, by the time you get to the end of a lesson, both you and the students may have had enough and a plenary may seem superfluous. I certainly did more starters than plenaries.
One old web page described the purpose of plenaries as follows:
- To help pupils reflect on what they have learned during the lesson or to link the learning to previous lessons.
- To refer back to the lesson objectives.
- To consolidate what pupils have learned during the lesson.
- To help pupils develop a habit of reflecting on their ways of learning.
One little point to mention: my preference for both starters and plenaries was for these to be mainly teacher-led, since this helps you grab the attention of the whole class and set the business-like tone of the lesson. In my last post, some of the ideas suggested paired activities too - all good provided you are confident the class will get on productively; that depends on how secure your relationships and behaviour management are. That's not to say that you can't just let students get on quietly with an individual task or do something which teacher and podcaster Liam Printer has talked about - giving a few minutes of self-selected reading every lesson to start the lesson (if you have the resources).
This page gives a list of ideas for both starters and plenaries. This page from Clare Seccombe's Lightbulb Languages site has French and Spanish starters and plenaries too.
Here are some ideas of my own that you could use to round off lessons. Once again the emphasis is largely on chunked language, simplicity, clarity and structure. You'll also note that they demand little if any preparation.
1. Complete my sentence
This was a regular 'go to' for me because you can make it up on the spot and tailor it closely to the class and the lesson. Just give the start of a sentence the class has seen or heard during the lesson and students must supply the next word or words. Students could jot down their choice on a mini-whiteboard or just respond hands up or hands down (cold calling).
2. What did you hear or read?
For this you could just ask students to tell you from memory examples of phrases or sentences they have seen, heard or used during the lesson. Better, though, might be to give them some sentences and ask them whether they had seen, heard or used the sentence during the lesson. You can improvise these, or glance at your text book or other resource to source examples. With the smartest classes you could make this a fairly subtle process by just adjusting vocabulary in minor ways. Or else, make the choices clear-cut.
Students could respond with a physical sign, e.g. thumbs up/down, standing up, or just noting their response on a mini-whiteboard or on paper.
3. Quick translation
Simple but fine. Give the class phrases or sentences to translate, either L1 to l2 (harder) or L2 to L1 (easier). You can fine-tune these to focus on areas you have been working on in the lesson (or previous lessons). For instance, if you had been emphasising tense changes with verb you could ask students to translate sentences or even individual verbs.
It's sometimes tempting to believe that simple activities like this are uncreative. Well, they may be uncreative, but with the right class they work well and do the job you want - getting students to recall and recycle language.
4. What was easy? What was hard?
This is a metacognitive activity ('thinking about learning' or 'thinking about thinking'). This would be a discussion with the class in L1 about aspects of the work they have been doing. It's a chance for students to get off their chest any issues they had or to celebrate what they have successfully mastered. You could do this just with hands up, or ask every student to jot something down which they could then tell you or discuss with a partner. For the second option to work you need to trust that the class have the skills and right attitude to this usefully, so probably better to do this as a whole class activity.
For you, of course, this can be very informative and help you plan future work. We often overestimate what students have understood.
5. Word association
This useful starter, filler or plenary is quite fun. Model the idea of word association in L1 and use it as an opportunity to show how semantic fields work in our heads. Suggest that we often choose the next associated word through similar meaning, similar sound, opposite meaning, collocation (e.g. 'cold' + 'weather') or just associations based on whim or personal experience.
Since this is a plenary, you could constrain the task somewhat by insisting that words (or phrases, if you prefer) relate to the them of the lesson. This can be tricky, though, so you may just need to let the activity take its course. In any case, it can be a relaxing way to round of a lesson with some vocab retrieval.
You could do this in small groups or pairs, with the same provisos mentioned earlier.
6. A story one word at a time
Picking up the same topic as the lesson, explain that the class will make up a little story in five minutes, but using only one word each at a time. Students are allowed to say full stop if a sentence has reached a natural end. Model the task first. So, to do this in English, a sequence might go something like this:
Last - Saturday - my - friend - Eric - went - to - the - hospital - with - his - dog - full stop. The dog - was called - .... and so on.
It's up to the class where the story goes. Stories can get silly, which is fun for the class. As with word association, you can't be certain that the language used will come from the lesson, but if you join in you can push the content in a certain direction. Or you can make sure a certain tense is used, for example.
I would 'cold call' for this and give students the option to 'pass' if they can't think of a next word. This takes the pressure off. Insist that they must not plan their words ahead. (In truth, this is hard to control, but it does encourage spontaneity and humour.)
Needless to say, to do this with some success students need a stock of language and some grammatical skill. For example, if one students gives a feminine gendered article, the following word needs to be feminine.
Not for every class, therefore, but could it work with yours?
7. Dictation-translation
Unlike (5) and (6) above this gets you focused on language you have used in the lesson. It's on the non-creative end of the spectrum! Just dictate phrases they have encountered. They write them down and translate them. They can compare with a partner or compare/correct with a version you write up. As with all dictation activities, inexperienced teachers are advised that dictation is hard, particularly in French so keep your language feasible to provide success.
8. Mind reading
This is a 'what am I thinking?' activity. Tell the class you are going to think of (or write down) a sentence or phrase they have used in the lesson. The class has to guess, e.g. with hands up or on mini-whiteboards. Beginners enjoy these simple guessing games.
You can bend the rules on this! If you are just thinking of a phrase/sentence and someone gets it on the first guess, you can change your phrase/sentence. A bit naughty, but it gets the class to produce more guesses. You can have a bit of fun by making happy face if they have guessed wrong, pretending it was right, then letting them down with a 'no'.
9. Keep talking
This is an oral fluency task. Tell students to work in pairs. Tell them that each partner has to try and speak with as little hesitation as possible about a topic from the lesson. The listener can time the performance of the speaker. If the topic was, say, daily routine, then each person has to describe their routine in as much detail as possible for as long as possible.
A twist would be that if one partner stalls, the other person has to take over by beginning their own account. You could make this competitive by having a winner as the person who can talk longest or the person with the fewer stops.
10. Spot the word/phrase
For this you tell the class to look out for a specific words/phrases or specific words/phrases from the lesson in an account you are going to read aloud. You could improvise this to take into account items which may have come up incidentally during the lesson. Students must respond physically if they think they have heard to word or phrase (standing up would work). If your relationships are good, you can encourage the students to be fearless about this and not wait until someone else has stood up.
You could say to the class that there is no guarantee that the displayed word(s)/phrase(s) will be used.
You could go out of your way to make sure you use the words often to get the class regularly standing up and sitting down. So if the chosen phrases were 'I think ' or 'I went' you could say something like this:
Last weekend I was very busy On Friday evening I went to the pub with my friends Joel and Elspeth. I think I had a couple of beers. What did we talk about? I think we talked about school and restaurants. On Saturdayy morning I went into town, I think. Yes, I went into town. I did some shopping. I think I spent around £30 on a pair of jeans. yes, £30, I think.
I hope these have given you food for thought or perhaps you can see ways to develop or improve each activity. Or perhaps you are just thinking "I do better plenaries than that!" Share any below in the comments if you like or on social media when I post.
Comments
Post a Comment