Tell me a story
Telling and
writing stories is a big part of the training in languages, wheter it´s your
native tounge or a second language.
We decided
to try the activity from Grand Canaria, where the students are given the task
of paring images and texts of different difficulty to complete a story.The
group was composed of 15 students age 15 – 16 , divided into four smaller
groups, each group with a different story.
1.
Selecting the students into groups.
I wanted to have as varied groups as possible according to gender and
ability, so I made sure there were students of both sexes in each group.
Since the number of students is low it was not possible to have mixed
abilities in each group so I decided to have 2 groups with mixed abilities, 1
group with high achievers and one group
with students of an intermediate level in english.
2. The activity.
Students followed each sequenced step of the activity, except for the
last one, there was not time to do the powerpoint presentation, and the
students thought it was actually more fun making posters.
3. Results / findings.
Also these two groups were the
ones least reluctant to ask for help.
The high achiever´s group had a slow start. There were two boys and one
girl. I originally appointed one of the boys to be „the boss“, but after a
while I had to change and made the girl the group leader, which made all the difference.
She is quite shy, but in this role she really shone. This group ended up doing
a very nice presentation of their story.
The last group, with students hwo were all at the same intermediate level
of knowlege and skill in english, had the most difficult time to finish the
work. They found it difficult to delegate tasks, could not agree on the best
way to do things and were on the whole rather negative towards the activity.I
had to step in and direct their work quite a bit and help them a lot, although
they did not ask for it.
After the students had finished their posters and presentations we had a
discussion about why we did this activity.
