Communicatify!

Communicatify is my new word for this school year! I can take absolutely no credit for that word - I learned it a month ago at IFLT from Andrea Schweitzer, who was my fellow co-member of the Intermediate-Low Cohort coaching team (along with Amy Wopat and Gary DiBianca, our leader). Andrea presented this topic to our cohort, as well as gave this presentation for the general IFLT audience.  Andrea's main message in her presentation was that although we may have a giant toolbox of activities which we do with our students, how many of these are actually communicative in purpose? 

However, there is no need to re-invent the wheel with our activities, because all we need to do is to modify them so that they now lead to purposeful communication. Andrea taught us two "words" and their purposes: 

• Communicatify: Make changes to shift the overall purpose of the game to that of communication as the means to achieve the overall goal of the game
• Vehiclize: Use the game as a vehicle for creating contextualized communication with your students (sort of like picture talk or movie talk etc).

These two words definitely have resonated with me, as I strive to create a communicative-based classroom and to facilitate activities which are rooted in purposeful communication. Not an easy task, but I am taking steps (baby steps, shall I say?) toward those ends! 

Last week in my Latin 3 classes, I played the Word Chunk Game/Trashketball. To be honest, I have never been a huge fan of this activity, but I would play it probably once a semester to give students both a break and a novel way with which to interact with a reading. However, Andrea showed us how we could communicatify and vehiclize this activity. The activity itself is still the same, but we can shift the game towards purposeful communication when it comes to students "shooting a basket" by asking students in the target language to predict if they think that the student will "make the basket/score a point". That seems like such a small, uneventful modification, but wow, when I asked students in Latin, "Do you think [student] will score a point?", I got a ton of participation from students answering yes or no!! I was then able to play with that, asking students questions and teaching them rejoinders for "go" and "boo". Suddenly, students were invested in the game IN LATIN!! Suddenly the activity was not about reviewing the reading per se (which was the vehicle) but about engaging students in conversation and providing understandable input for them with which to interact and to respond.

Here is an example in Spanish of how Andrea has "communicatifized" Trashketball in her classes (start video around 12:59):

Observations

1. In her demonstration of Trashketball, Andrea has a 2-point, 4-point, and 6-point line from which students can attempt a basket (with two chances), so in Latin I was also able to ask the student who was about to shoot a basket, "How many points do you want to score? Do you want to score 2 points? Are you sure you want to score 2 points? Maybe you want to score 4 points?" Meanwhile students of their own accord began yelling out, "Six points" IN LATIN to the student! And if a student missed the first shot, I could say in Latin, "Do you still want to score 4 points? Maybe you want to score 2 points." But students on their own were still yelling "Six points" IN LATIN! And then I could restart the whole questioning again, "Do you think Student A will score X points?"
2. I made a change to my original Word Chunk Game based on Andrea's example. I will still pull out a student's name from a bag and ask them a question. However, now the team can pick one person to be its representative to shoot a basket. This makes the conversation more focused when I ask the class if they think Student A will score points, and most likely, the student who is attempting the shot is okay with being the center of attention.
3. Wow, such a small change to Word Chunk Game/Trashketball suddenly made this a communicative-based activity, because I was able to engage in conversations with students in a very understandable way and to continue giving them comprehensible input.

I now love the Word Chunk Game/Trashketball and cannot wait to play it again with students. Last week, after I had played this new "communicatifized" version of the game, I texted Andrea, Gary, and Amy about my experience and profusely thanked Andrea for showing us this!