Interactive Student Responses

If you are looking for a way to get your students to participate in a story beyond the basic "Ohhh" response in a TPRS story, here are some ways in which I get students to respond whenever I say particular vocabulary words:

Examples of class responses

1. subito (suddenly) - entire class gasps aloud.
2. sed (but) - entire class says "BUUUUT" in their most, sarcastic, valley girl, middle school way. I learned this from Annabelle Allen.
3. tamen (however/neverthless) - entire class sings "tamen, tamen means however, however; tamen tamen, means nevertheless" to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus. I learned this from Karen Rowan who did it in Spanish and from Miriam Patrick who then adapted it into Latin.
4. eheu (oh no) - entire class says "Oh no!" very dramatically.

Examples of individual student responses

1. apparet/apparent (appears) - student's job is to say "POOF."
2. quis/quae/qui (who) - student's job is to hoot "Hoo hoo" like an owl. I learned this from Ben Wang and Linda Li.
3. quid (what) - student's job is to say "what WHAAAT."

Now these are different from rejoinders which students can yell out depending on what is being discussed, since these are specific responses to vocabulary words. 

Observations

1. These are a great way to incorporate more student participation in class. In fact, as I introduce more of these in class, I will have students who will specifically ask me if they can have one of these "jobs." Even better is when I have more than one student wanting to do a particular response so that it becomes necessary to have "tryouts," which means more repetitions for the class to hear.
2. The individual student responses requires those students who are assigned that job to be active listeners, because they are always on call. 
3. I use these to introduce words which I know are important but may not be as easy for students to recall. Usually after awhile, I do not feel that it is necessary for students to say these responses, because I feel that they have acquired these words, but heaven forbid if I do not let students respond to them! It makes me laugh that students have taken such ownership of them that they demand the chance to respond. A few years ago, in one of my classes, I deliberately stopped using the word tamen, because I got tired of hearing the class sing the song so much! 

I love learning other responses from teachers. Alina Filipescu has a lot of them which I plan to steal! What are some which you use in your classroom?