Survive!

STUDENTS: 4th of ESO

DURATION: 2:00’

CONTEXT

This CLIL task belongs to a Didactic Sequence from the subject “àmbit de cultura i valors, cultura i valors ètics”. Supposedly, in this subject and in previous classes, students have been working in competences like:

1 “Actuar amb autonomia en la presa de decisions i ser responsable dels propis actes”.
3 ”Qüestionar-se i usar l’argumentació per superar prejudicis i consolidar el pensament propi”.
4 “Identificar els aspectes ètics de cada situació i donar-hi respostes adients i preferentment innovadores”.
5 “Mostrar actituds de respecte actiu envers les altres persones, cultures, opcions i creences”.
10 “Realitzar activitats de participació i de col·laboració que promoguin actituds de compromís i democràtiques”.

The idea was to create a task to reaffirm their critical thinking, improve autonomy, promote ethical values and different criteria to assess, not just their own actions and responsibilities, but also that of the complex society they are living in. So, with this task students should be able to present and discuss different points of view and defend their opinions.

ACTIVITY DESCRIPTION

Name of the activity: Survive!

Duration: 2 hours.

Summary of the session: Students will have to identify the main traits that makes them who they are (hobbies, personality, ideology, friends and family, etc.). Later, they will be given a card with basic information about a character (job, gender, age, etc.) and they will have to develop the rest of their character’s personality.

Afterwards they will be arranged in groups. Each group will be given an apocalyptic scenario, and they will have to explain their character to the group. Once all the characters have been explained, they will have to convince each other about why their own character has to survive in that apocalyptic context and give a convincing justification of their choice.

Activity:

Opening (15-20 min)

Teacher’s own presentation (5 min).
Students’ own description (15 min).

During the first stage of the activity, students will be asked to describe their personality to the smallest detail. They will have to write down the smallest detail about themselves, providing as much information as possible and writing it down. The teacher will do it with himself/herself to show them how detailed the information must be. Students are allowed to draw, to write poems, lyrics from songs, etc. This will be handed to the teacher so that he/she checks those essays at home and gives feedback about spelling and grammar.

Skills: Students will practice listening and writing mostly. Students will work individually. The teacher will work as a support for those students that need it, especially for those with higher difficulties (PI, low academic level, etc.)

Main activity (30-35min)

During the next activity, students will be given one of the character’s cards (check Materials). They will have to do the same than in the opening activity, but bearing in mind the character’s given information. The teacher will remind them the title of the activity, “Survive!”, so that they develop their character focusing on the concept of survival. They will have to provide the following information:

3 hobbies, the character domain and the background of those hobbies in the characters’ story.
3 social/ political/ ideological implications and preferences.
3 positive personality traits.
2 negative personality traits.

Students are allowed to draw, write some lyrics, idioms, etc. They will have to create a short and schematic draft about their character. Students will have to tell to their “desk mate” the character they have created in order to obtain/give feedback from/to him or her.

Students will work individually and in pairs. Teacher will work as a support and he/she will guide students.

Skills: Students will have to practice speaking and writing skills. They will also work present and past tense, and use of descriptive verbs.

After creating their character, students will be distributed into 3 different groups of 8-9 students. All of them will have a different character and the specifics of that character. Each group will be given a card describing an apocalyptic world: “Alien invasion”, “Zombie apocalypse” and “Machine rebellion” (check Materials). Students will read the apocalyptic situation and ,once this one is clear, they will have to explain to their group the reasons why they believe their character should be included in the “survivals’ group”. One of them will not make it.

Skills: Speaking and interaction will be paramount to develop this activity. Students will make use of future tense and comparatives. Listening and reading will also be involved. The teacher will work as a mediator and judge in case of internal conflict. Students will work in big groups.

Closing (15-20 min)

For this last activity, students will have to choose a captain for their adventure. The captain will have to briefly (5 min) explain to the rest of the class the apocalyptic world they were given and which character was left behind.

Skills: listening and speaking. The teacher will act as a mediator. Students will work individually. The aims throughout the entire session are both linguistic and content related.

LANGUAGE AND CONTENT OBJECTIVES

Linguistic aims

By the end of the project students will be able to make predictions, formulate hypothesis, share opinions, ideas, and values to decide and justify their critical thinking. With this task students will be able to practice skills like fluency, and accurate personal description. In fact, speaking skills are one of the most relevant skills for this activity, due to the interaction and fluency required. They will need to communicate with their team and explain their character. Writing skills will be also necessary in order to develop their character and show it to their classmates. Listening skills will be needed in order to gather as much information as possible from their classmates, process what their peers and teacher are saying and answer accordingly. Moreover, reading skills will be necessary to obtain the information from the materials. As in any group class, there will be different levels but our objective is focusing in fluency rather than accuracy, so what we expect from them is to be confident in using the target language. However, we assume that there will be different levels of command in using structures, tenses, etc.

Content aims

Students will be working on different and related topics, with a core theme: individuals. They will learn to develop and construct a sense of individuality, self-esteem and cooperation to talk about prejudices against the other. They will work on personality description, hobbies, political and ideological choices. Due to being an activity based on decision making, they will need to decide and choose which features and characteristics will help their character to live in an apocalyptic world, as well as justify to others why they are a relevant key member.

ASSUMED KNOWLEDGE

As we have already mentioned in more than one section, we are perfectly aware that there will be different levels of command in each group of students, but we assume that all students have basic knowledge about all the language needs, as they will have already worked on that in their English language lessons. Actually, the main objective of this session is to give them the opportunity to practise all they have been working on in class but in a much more active and appealing way than what they would usually do.

LANGUAGE NEEDS

A very strong point about the activity we have designed is that it is very adaptable, that is, that it can be used with a wide range of levels and student typologies. The fact that it has quite simple language needs may be the main reason that explains this characteristic.

The main language needs that we have to provide students with in order to be able to successfully and actively participate in this activity are the following:

Opinion verbs and expressions, such as “I think/believe that”, “In my opinion”, “Personally”, “From my point of view”, “As far as I’m concerned”, “If you ask me”, “To be honest (with you)”, etc.
Expressing agreement and disagreement with other people’s statements and opinions and refute somebody else’s arguments: “I agree/don’t agree (with you)”, “I disagree”, “I completely agree”, “I see your point but…”, “I understand what you mean, but...”, etc.
Making concessions and clarifying opinion using expressions like “While this might be true for A, this will never be possible for B”, “Of course this might be true, but...”, “By this I mean...”, “I’m referring to...” and so on.
Modal verbs and similar structures to express different degrees of possibility, certainty or uncertainty and even obligation, as they will have to convince the other participants: “may”, “might”, “maybe”, “possibly”, “probably”, “I’m sure that”, “must”, “have to”, “should”, etc.
Vocabulary to accurately describe a person, focusing on their personality, ideology, hobbies and skills. The are allowed to use the dictionary when preparing this part of the activity, as we want them to write really accurate descriptions and to acquire new vocabulary that maybe they didn’t know before.

Of course, the complexity of the vocabulary and linguistic items may be higher or lower depending on the level of the students with which the teacher wishes to implement the activity.

This speaking activity that we have designed is basically a game, so the fact that they enjoy it is important and, actually, one of our objectives. However, we do not want our students to forget that they are learning and practising English, so we want to remind them of the linguistic goals of the activity, so they pay attention to the language they are producing. In order to achieve this objective, we came up with two strategies. The first one refers to the use of the English language during the whole activity, so we basically want to avoid the use of Spanish and Catalan in the English classroom. To do that, we decided that every time someone spoke in a language other than English we would penalise this student’s team with a red post-it. At the end of the game we would count the post-its and subtract the corresponding points, so having quite a lot of red post-its may really affect the possibilities of a team to win the competition. The other strategy that we would use in order to foster the students’ appropriate production would be to print and cut out several sets of expressions that we want them to use when speaking. Every team would have a couple of these sets and every time someone used one of the expressions from the sets he or she could keep that piece of paper and, at the end of the activity, we would count each team’s pieces of paper and these would award them extra points, which could help them make up for the points they lost with the post-its.

Example of one of the sets just mentioned:

In my opinion...

I think that...

From my point of view...

I see your point but,....

I completely disagree!

You can’t be serious!

While this might be true for…….., this will never be possible for…...

Of course you may be right, but...

What I mean is that...

I’m referring to...

ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS

In this activity, we talk about society and some of its problematics and taboos, like racism, sexual orientation, fascism, religion, etc. But we think that is completely normal and enriching because the game gives place for all these topics to arise and be discussed among students and, from our point of view, that is exactly what we should do in the “Cultura i valors” subject. With this activity, we can talk with students about respect, prejudices, discrimination, etc. and we honestly think that it is something very positive. Of course, we are perfectly aware of the problems that such an activity might cause, as the direction of the school, some students or some parents may feel that it is not a suitable activity to work on at school, but we completely disagree. As it has already been mentioned, we believe that this kind of activities can have an incredibly positive impact on our students and give space for interesting and thoughtful debates about a wide range of social and personal topics. We also consider that public schools should and actually must be an opened and safe space to carry out this kind of discussions, without neither taboos nor moral and social repressions.

IMPLEMENTATION

This activity we designed and described has already been implemented by one of our group members in a 4t ESO class and we can say it had a completely successful outcome. Unfortunately, we were not able to record the session.

STRATEGIES

To help students understand

Clearly stating the objectives of the task and what is expected from them.
Contextualizing key vocabulary so that they have resources to fulfill the task.
Using appropriate speech according to the student’s level of comprehension.
Paraphrasing.

To help students to produce

Adding post-its or other visual materials to facilitate their communication.
Provide enough time to allow students to think.
Interacting.
The sets with expressions and vocabulary that we already mentioned and illustrated in the “Language needs” section.
The “red post-its” strategy, whose aim is basically to motivate them to produce only in English.

Results and reflections after implementation:

After implementing this activity, we realized that there are some significant flaws. The first one is that when students are in the middle of the activity/game, they tend to forget about the linguistic structures they should be using. We thought this might be solved by giving them some cards with the expressions written on them, and every time they use one of them they will be getting extra credit for it. The problem with this technique is that adding it to the activity will probably make it a bit confusing, and, even if we want to make students use those expressions, our goal is mainly fluency instead of accuracy.

We also modified the number of “social/political/ideological preferences” that their characters should have. It was 4 at the beginning, but it was very hard for the students to think about that many, so during the activity we reduced it to 3.

As positive aspects of this activity, it reached our original goals. It made students think about their prejudices and struggle with themselves. For some students it was very hard trying to “sell” to their group certain characters and there was a situation in which they were clearly bias by their prejudices (during the activity one of the groups decided that the “white supremacist character” was going to betray them, even if his characterization never implied any sign of being treacherous).

The activity was also very interesting in terms of making the students produce oral texts. We were actually very surprised about how well it worked, considering that they are not used to speak in English for long periods of time, and the part of the debate lasted for more than one hour. In this case, the “red post-it technique” was very useful, and after the third post-it they were very much aware of the language they were using.

In sum, the activity achieved its main goals, but there is still room for improvement. We need to find out how to make them use certain expressions, and the significance of the content could be more explicit so that they can clearly see the objective of the activity. Still, we consider the implementation of this activity as a success, both in terms of language and content.

MATERIALS

In order to see the materials for the activity, check the separate document we attached.