More activities to revise language in class at low levels

Why do activities to revise language in class? Teachers sometimes see class time as only for ‘new’ input. Revision is for students to do at home. I understand that idea. It also depends a bit how long your class is. If you have one 50 or 60-minute class a week, maybe that makes some sense. And students do have to take some responsibility, right? Ultimately, languages are truly learnt and certainly become more ‘real’ when students study and use the language outside class. But then many students set aside 3 or 4 hours of their week to do a class, so expecting a huge amount extra is not realistic. And as I have suggested elsewhere (in an old post about learning Russian), many students just don’t like language learning enough compared to the other activities that they can do in their free time! So if we want students to progress, doing revision activities in class does become a necessity. And at the very least we can do this leading up to an end of year assessment, though the evidence is that revision is more effective when it is also done soon after the initial learning.

Interactive activities to revise language

It is also worth thinking about how revision in class will normally be different to revision out of class. When we do activities to revise language in class, we can incorporate interaction between the students. The simplest way we might have this element is to ask students to repeat a conversation / task that they did in a previous lesson or unit. At low levels, we often have very basic types of conversations to begin with which often are very restricted within the unit and are not explicitly expanded upon later in the course. So, to revise unit 1 of your coursebook we might imagine that students will start with the question Where are you from? In our revision class we might ask students to have this conversation and try and continue it for as long as they can. In unit 2 (of a more traditional book) we might have What is your job? Unit 3 might be a shopping scenario. In each case we take the initial routine question as the starting point and seek to have the conversation you would have rather than necessarily what the particular unit of the book presented.

Interpreting as both prompt and a push in revision activities

You might both support and push students in these revision conversations by using an interpreting task, where student A is the English speaker, Student B a non-English speaker and student C is interpreting between the two. You will probably find students will be able to continue the conversation for longer (the push) because the own language speaker has no problems in asking or commenting to continue the conversation. However, the process also supports the translator and English speaker because they have time to think and the L1 speaker is also providing ideas of what to say. As a teacher, you can reteach language as feedback or provide a little new language and then reconfigure the groups to do the task again. As I mentioned in my previous post this isn’t only activities to revise language is about focusing on vocabulary and grammar at the same time.

Open tasks and teacher input

The second difference between doing revision activities in class compared to home is that you have a teacher present! You can already see the benefit of this above, because the teacher can provide feedback on what students have forgotten. They can also take the opportunity to teach some new language where relevant. It also allows for activities to revise language in ways that are more elaborative and have multiple or ambiguous answers.

An open activity to revise language

For example we could take a series of questions from previous units or related to particular lexical sets. For example:

Who do you live with?

What would you like to eat?

What time does the class start?

How many brothers and sisters do you have?

What do you do in your free time?

How do you get there?

What do you do?

What did you do last night?

Where did you stay?

Is there a bank near here?

You could dictate these using L1 or the L2 as I discussed in the previous post. In class, you could then get students to write 5 or six different answers to each question. They can do this revision activity individually or in pairs or groups.

Teachers pushing beyond the initial test

The teacher can then collect these answers form the different groups and check they are correct. But the teacher can also ask follow-up questions. These may simply push students to recall more language or they might be genuine questions to the students. For example, say a student gives the word A sandwich as an answer, the teacher might ask follow-up questions. What kind of sandwiches can you have? Do you like sandwiches? Do you eat sandwiches much? When did you last have a sandwich? Was it nice?

You can gloss these questions with the L1 as you ask them. I discuss this process as part of initial teaching too in this video about outcomes beginner.

A creative sorting task

Another kind of task with ambiguous answers is to give student different pictures or to think of their own house. You then get students to use a word list or their notes from a previous unit to place words against the different pictures or within the room in their house. Students can compare their choices and explain there differences. These explanations at low levels may require students to use their own language or be supported by the teacher in a whole class session.

Testing and retrieval with activities in class

Of course part of these previous tasks to revise language could be done at home. We could, for example, send an audio file of the list of questions and students could also do the generation of answers at home too. However, when we do the revision tasks in class we can truly ensure that students are doing this from memory.  They are really trying to retrieve/ recall language rather than simply reading through notes or copying from google translate.  This distinction between retrieval and reading notes, is a key component of retaining knowledge in the long term memory – along with elaboration we saw in the previous section. These processes are described more fully in the book make it stick.

We could for example regularly start the class with asking individual students to write or orally record all the language that they remember from the previous in previous lesson. We could reprint tasks or texts they previously had and remove the word pools from the gap-fill exercise or gap the texts and get students to individually or collectively recall the missing words. You don’t necessarily have to go through the answers, You could tell students to go home and compare with their wordlist or the pages in the book and note down everything that they had forgotten. You might ask the students to send you the list of these forgotten words / phrases. These could ‘forgotten’ words could be the ones you use to grammaticalize and use in a future activity to revise language.

It never has to be just revision

Finally, to return to the argument we started with, we should remember that activities to revise language don’t have to be only about revision. We can plan to teach new input (as I discussed in the previous post, or as we see above we can have tasks where students are given space to go beyond what they learnt previously, where the teacher can provide new language. New language which may be better remembered by being embedded in the old.

See our next webinar on Using L1 in the class this week. If you can’t make it live, you can get a recording and there is the option of joining a post-webinar discussion two weeks later. We also have our next zoom courses starting on May 8th and 10th.