Homophones Talent Show

By Laurent Duval, Dawson College

At a Glance

Discipline

Languages

Instructional Level

College & CEGEP

Tasks in Workflow

Social Plane(s)

Individual
Group
Whole Class

Type of Tasks

Solving problems
Analyzing
Creating & designing
Writing
Presenting

Technical Details

Useful Technologies

Zoom (for the video conference)

Class size

Small (20-49)

Time

Multiple class periods (2-3 classes)

Instructional Purpose

Application & knowledge building
Consolidation & metacognition

Overview

In this activity, students are given a homophone to work on in their groups and have to demonstrate their understanding of the proper use of it as well as common pitfalls students experience when using the homophone.

In class, the instructor provides the students with guidelines for the assignment and gives a brief revision on the subject, noting the homophones that often cause the most problems. Students then identify the grammatical category of the homophone and use it in a sentence. They then come up with a creative trick to remember the rule, keeping in mind common mistakes when devising their trick. Each group presents their trick to the class in the form of a talent show (ex. A song, a skit, or a video), they also provide the teacher with a small quiz to ask the class after their presentation is done to show that they retained their trick.

Finally, students put their tricks on Moodle for everyone to have access to and they answer questions on homophones at home. They then write a short reflective text about what they retained from the exercise and which homophones they have difficulties with.

Instructional Objectives

Students will be able to:

Demonstrate proper use of a homophone
Identify the categories for their homophone

Workflow & Materials

Activity Workflow

View on CourseFlow

Contributor's Notes

Benefits

As it is often a challenge to translate knowledge from a rule to their writing, this activity helps students to integrate it better by giving them useful tricks
They revise grammar in a more creative way which helps students overcome the difficulties they often have with this subject in 101 French in a more fun way
They have access to other people’s work so it serves as a memory bank for students to consult any time
The collaborative work helps to build a better class atmosphere and to expose people to new rules they had not heard of before

Challenges

Since the guidelines for the activity are relatively free, sometimes students have difficulty staying in line with the objective or take too much time.
If done in class, there is a lot of time wasted between presentations and the polling system does not work as smoothly or have immediately available results.

Tips

The instructor has to give the students clear guidelines and show them examples
It is best to do the activity earlier on in the semester to see the grammatical problems right away before they write the midterm and do their oral presentations
The format of the video conference is very beneficial as it makes the presentations a lot quicker to do.

Applied Strategies

Toolkit

Personalized tool and knowledge bank

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Published: 14/08/2019

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