language exchange ideas
September 26th, 2005 by heatherI’d love to try an exchange with a native language speaker, but in the past face-to-face I’ve ended up speaking moostly english, and not really know what to do.
Over on 43things, I saw someone write about the problem, and was curious to ask more about it:
http://www.43things.com/comments/thread/128292
The writer, Joaquim, mentions two possible places to meet Japanese people for language exchange: jyve.com and mixi.jp. I’ll put that on my list of things to do.
Since I’m a point-blank beginner, i really can’t engage in free flowing conversation with a native speaker. i was starting to think of maybe worksheets that we could use in a language exchange. david sent me some pages with vocab, and some cute illustrations, etc. So, I’m getting excited… david and i are going to try out a language exchange via skype.
I was thinking it would be cool to make sheets expressedly for the purpose of language exchange. you could actually make up little activities or guessing games to prompt yourself into producing speech.
So you could have a two part exchange that could even work with two beginners exchanging together.
1. Preparation: models of grammatical structure
2. Reference: vocabulary list
3. Q+A or simple conversation to read
4. Some kind of activity… where you are both looking at sheets, talking to each other and maybe having some kind of guessing game… something where you have to think. Maybe a guessing game.
5. Prompts for free talk: talking about your own personal situation.
Anyway, just throwing that out there. We’ll see how the exchange goes, and I might know better then how to maake useful materials for it.
September 26th, 2005 at 11:09 pm
Have you ever played this? - http://www.boardgames.com/trguwhoga.html
When we get good enough to describe people, that would be a great game to play!
September 26th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
In fact, that is such a genius idea! You could make sets of cards to fit any level of vocabulary or context. Rooms, for example: some with a clock on the wall, some without (and clocks in diffferent positions, telling different times); some with a bookshelf, TV, radio etc. The pictures rich in detail, but each only subtly different from the others, so you’d need to ask quite a few questions to get the right card. As with ‘Guess Who?’, the fun is in the game - language learning is a neat by-product.
Boy. Let’s patent this before someone nicks it!
September 27th, 2005 at 6:28 am
Or, for telling the time, how about:-
– An A4 sheet divided into boxes, say 4 boxes by 12
– Each box contains a unique time (on a clockface, or written in kanji or hiragana?)
– With 48 combinations, each hour and each 5-minute time would be used 4 times.
You each have the same sheet.
A says: いまなんじですか
B picks a time at random and reads it. Both tick it on their sheets.
Then A asks and B answers, etc., until the sheet is finished.
I’ll mock one up before Thursday’s chat, and we can give it a try.
September 27th, 2005 at 10:30 am
cool! i like that activity idea.
one minor glitch! i’ve thought of ideas too, where they are illustrated “in rich detail”… are you an illustrator? me neither.
small problem.
i’ve sketched a worksheet too, maybe we can try alll these things out. i was thinking it should have ‘all you need’ for that lesson. and i started sketching, putting the vocabulary down the right hand side, so you could cover it if you want.
it’s easier to see this in the drawing i made, but i don’t have a scanner.
i’ll put this out there, and do one up and send it to you.
the basic idea is that you’re given the structures, and vocabulary, and have some kind of activity, like your ‘box ticking’ activity, then some kind of online activity to maximise the fact that you’re both online doing these chats… and then maybe one kind of advanced activity that you could try the next time you use the sheets?
Sheet 1:
a) structures
(read through these with your partner)
b) Q+ A
partners take turns asking questions and answering
c) fill in the blanks guessing activity
(partners fill in times, and when they read them out, partner has to guess)
Sheet 2:
d) online activity- using internet resources with partner
go to worldclock.com and ask what time it is in which country; use katakana to name cities…
e) advanced activity- producing language
using online resources to look up schedules in japan.
reading schedules, when is the next train to …
when is the next flight to …
September 27th, 2005 at 10:32 am
oh and that travel guess who game looks good!
illustrations are a major bummer… but i used to have some copyright-free clip art CDs. i gave them to a friend and might be able to get my hands on them.
know anything about copyright? can i use copyright-free images in GPL documents?
September 29th, 2005 at 5:52 pm
I really really like the “Guess which ?” idea. I hope that would come with a vocabulary sheet; hard to learn if you have no idea what to say. Sadly, no illustrator skills at this end either, but I would love to help somehow, so I’m subscribing to this feed.
September 30th, 2005 at 10:29 am
david and i tested it out yesterday! it was good.
the vocabulary list is down the right side, so if you wanted, you could fold it over or cover it up.
we also found little things like, when david noticed you have to refresh the webpage you’re getting the world times from, otherwise you’ll be saying the same minute all the time.
i want to make it look a bit cooler and make some corrections & i still have to get a native speaker to check it over- but it should be ready by net week!