alice’s posterous

This week, in Spanish, we worked on a conversation between a mum and his son about his new girlfriend. The mum wants to know about his son's new girlfriend and keeps asking him how she looks like (description vocabulary: hair, eyes, size...). And of course, the son doesn't want to say much to her mum. This conversation can be found on Gente Joven 1, a great Spanish textbook I mentioned in an earlier post.

First students listened to the conversation and answered questions about it. Then I gave them some key phrases and expressions from the conversation. Some key expressions applied to the mum "A ver, ¡cuentame!" "¿Como es?", "¿Es guapa?"..., others applied to the son "¡Pero mama!", "si, es muy, muy guapa", "Es morena, alta y delgada"...
Students worked in pairs and had to say the phrases with the correct pronunciation and gestures. I let them repeat and repeat the phrases to really get into their roles and pretend they were Spanish people (very loud and with lots of gestures!). Despite the fact the task was quite repetitive, the students really enjoyed repeating the phrases with the correct pronunciation.

Finally, once they got into their roles, I asked students to prepare their own conversations using some of the phrases they repeated as well I using their own. I told them they were going to be recorded and marked on their pronunciation, fluency and the correct use of feminine and masculine words. Students really got engaged and worked hard to prepare and rehearse their presentations.

The following lesson, I recorded students' conversations. Whilst, they were being recorded the other groups would mark them on pronunciation, fluency and the correct use of feminine and masculine words. At the end of each recording, we would discuss the performance. I noticed students would always remain positive in their comments but would also be sharp on incorrect sentences
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I was extremely pleased with students' performances and I could really see they enjoyed doing the task. I posted their recordings on the school blog and I have asked them to post some comments.

What about you? have you experienced a fun and engaging speaking task?

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Click here to download:

1_phonics.ppt (901 KB)

When Suzi Bewell talked to me about phonics, I didn't know what she was on about! She explained to me what it was and did a explanatory presentation on strategies for teaching French phonics (also Suzi Bewell set up a blog for her school which is amazing! http://www.allsaintslanguagesblog.typepad.co.uk/):>

I thought it was a brilliant idea to improve students' pronunciation. Most of the time, we teachers assume that our students know how to pronounce words in the target language, but in fact they don't. They are very confused when we correct them and then their motivation to learn another language starts to decrease! That is why I am thinking of planning strategies to teach my students Spanish phonics next year, although I do think Spanish is very easy to pronounce (compared to French!). For most of the words, you just pronounce them as you read them apart from some letters like "jota" for example. Rachel Hawkes did a lot of work on how to teach Spanish phonics and her blog is full of excellent ideas. I found one of her Powerpoints on ideas to teach phonics (just see above).

What are you thoughts? Have you tried teaching phonics to improve your students' pronunciation?

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