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Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Verb/Person "Who Would Say This?" Listening Activity

Just recently, my colleague John Foulk put a twist on a listening activity which we have been using as an assessment. He took our existing "Who is This?" activity (where as the teacher you say aloud a short description of particular characters in the target language from a story, and students write down which character it is) and turned it into a "Who Would Say This?" In Latin 2, we have been reading an adapted version of the "Mercury-as-a-1-day-old-baby" myth and all of his "adventures," such as sneaking out of the house, finding and killing a turtle, creating/inventing a lyre from the turtle shell and guts, stealing Apollo's cows, etc. There were a number of characters in the story, so John created "I...." statements about the characters for students to hear and to write down who would say this.

Example
  1. Ego in agro laborabam et vidit puerum ducentem boves (I was working in the field and saw a boy leading cows)
  2. Ego feci lyram e corpore testudinis (I made a lyre from the body of a turtle)
  3. Mercurius meas boves cepit (Mercury stole my cows)
  4. Ego duxi quinquaginta boves retro ad mare (I led 50 cows backwards to the sea)
  5. Meus filius vigilabat, sed ego dormiebam (My son was awake, but I was sleeping).
  6. Ego super montes currebam (I was running over the mountains)
Observations
  1. This was a great practice of having students hear the use of the 1st-person. Although the story was primarily written in the 3rd-person, students did not have any problems hearing the 1st person and recognizing which character would say the statement.
  2. Students were very familiar with the story, so to hear sentences about characters now in the 1st person was not tricky.
  3. This activity involved higher-order thinking as students had to determine who would say the statement.
  4. This was a very easy activity to facilitate!
  5. I suppose one could change this to 2nd person and implement it that way too.

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