Student Assignment
1. Looking closely at the answers
- Choose two situations from the Situation Reactions list, and print the corresponding responses.
- Look up the meanings of words or references you don’t understand, write in the margins of the printed answers.
- Look closely at what words are used on each side. Count them, circle and underline them on the printed answers.
- Organize your observations in different categories describing the types of reactions, and see which ones are prevalent in each culture: Who intervenes? What are the basic assumptions? Who disapproves? Who approves? How do people show their disapproval?
2. Making hypotheses, asking questions
Write and bring to class a few sentences (in L2) to summarize your observations, make hypotheses as to why your exchange partners would give such answers, think about the questions you could ask to verify your answers. This will help during the class conversation.
3. Writing on the forums
Post comments (in L1) on the corresponding forums. Remember to share you observations, make hypotheses, ask questions, and answer your partners' questions.
In-class Activities
Working on content
Your class can be organized in many different ways. You can either ask students to associate with partners who have worked with the same Situations as them, or ask them to find partners who have worked with completely different Situations.
In both cases, they start with sharing their findings within their group.
- If they worked on the same items, did they make similar observations? Ask them to pool and summarize their findings on the board.
- If they worked on different items, are there correlations or similarities across the responses? Do similar concepts emerge? Ask them to post the most important findings on the board.
Then ask groups to share their observations with the rest of the class.
After each group is done working on the board, students from all groups can freely walk around the class, read the comments, and draw arrows connecting certain words and/or concepts which seem to appear often. The whole class debriefing is therefore very animated, since the students have already established connections between their separate observations.
Encourage students to also make connections with what they might have observed while working on the first two questionnaires. Do they see some correlations? Contradictions?
At the end of class, remind all students to return to the forums before the next class session.
Working on vocabulary
The work on content and vocabulary is closely related.
While a group presents their observations about a Situation, project the answers on a screen. Members of the presenting group then clarify words and expressions for their classmates upon request. If a reference is unclear, google the word or expression to see in what context it appears, and tell students to post a question for their partners on the forum.
Another way to reinforce vocabulary is to ask students who have worked on a specific Situation to mime for the rest of the class the different reactions described in the answers, from both cultures. The class needs to identify the Situation, and provide words describing the types of reactions.
Working on grammar
Work on grammar can take many forms, depending on the languages of the two groups.
For instance, in an American/French exchange, the Situation Reactions questionnaires provide a vast pool of examples of object pronouns. A very simple exercise consists in asking students to pick from the answers the largest variety of pronouns and pronouns combinations, and elucidate why they were used, replacing them in a full sentence with nouns, depending on the given Situation. This can be done during class in small group, or assigned separately.
Some students, working in small groups, can also be asked to make a list of three or four answers with a variety of pronouns, and have the class guess what the Situation is.
Students can also review verbs by making lists of all the conjugated verbs and trying to come up with their infinitive form. They can organize the verbs by types of endings; identify regular and irregular verbs; conjugate them in several tenses; review their exchange partners' responses and identify spelling or grammar mistakes.