Student Assignment
1. Looking closely at the answers
- Choose two topics from the Sentence Completion 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 the answers. Count them, circle and underline them on the printed page. Regroup words expressing similar types of ideas, and give a title to the different categories you create.
- see what categories are more prevalent in each culture
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.
Activities in the Classroom
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 Sentences as them, or ask them to find partners who have worked with completely different Sentences.
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 questionnaire. 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 Sentence, 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.
Organizing the answers into categories, when working with the Sentence Completions answers, creates an excellent opportunity to discuss with the entire group the many possible ways to name a category, and to look together for the best word or expression to name it, choosing among the different categories created by different students. It is also a good opportunity to discuss how the meaning of certain words can be interpreted differently, depending of the category in which they are assigned.
Very interesting discussions can happen also around concepts which can be expressed in one word in one language, but have no exact translation in the other language. In an American/French exchange, the word "home" would be hard to translate, for instance.
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 Sentence Completions questionnaires provide a vast pool of examples of relative pronouns. A very simple exercise consists in asking students to pick from the answers the largest variety of relative pronouns, and elucidate why they were used. This can be done during class in small group, or assigned separately.
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.