Easing Into Questions

Getting the kids to make conversation is difficult for a variety of reasons.  One of those issues is being able to make questions and switch from the "I" perspective and endings to the "you" perspective and endings and then possibly to another form to talk about someone else.  All those endings changing up makes a lot of my kids a bit nervous especially at the beginning of the year.

Today my Spanish III students took a mini-quiz on present tense verbs.  Students who scored 8 or lower out of 10 worked with me in a smaller group on forming sentences with these verbs and specific subjects before eventually joining the whole class activity dealing with questions.

And what was this activity?  Find-out-the-answer-to-one-teacher-created-question-about-each-classmate.  Earlier I took the list of regular verbs the students are reviewing and I made one question in the present tense about each student.  For example, ¿Baila Mariana bien?  Students then had to switch the question into the tú form to ask it on a one-on-one basis to the named student.  After he or she responded in a whole sentence (yo form practice!), the first student had to write a whole sentence answer which wasn't that hard since the verb was already in the él form in the written question.

The questions ranged from pretty normal (¿Barre Adriana el garaje?) to a little bit more...unique (¿Invade Jorge Cuba?)

Overall I liked the activity even though I know it was not the most authentic speaking situation.  It gave the students practice in changing up verb forms.  It also increased the chance to use Spanish.  Plus it meant that they had to learn each other's Spanish names a little more!

I think if I do it again, I would have two questions for each student.  Because each student only had to answer one specific question, he or she didn't really have to think about the response.  Two questions would require more active listening.  I might also have students write the other students' responses in English to practice vocabulary more; the él form is already written on the paper so I'm not sure how much thinking they had to do for it although it was a lot of repetitive practice on the correct ending.  I was also able to catch other grammatical errors when I looked over their response sheets.