Aim (in terms of subject matter): To revise the vocabulary covered before, to diversify the “family presentation discourse”.   

Aim (in terms of thinking): To practise grouping sentences (ENV model).

Target audience: Year 1.

Time: 1.5 lessons (60 minutes).

Task description: during the lessons the students have to prepare drafts for their essays about their families. To make the task more creative and demanding I told the students that they were describing the family in order to win the right to accept an exchange student for 1 year.     

Learners’ response: the students were given 15 minutes to go through the textbook units they’ve covered and write as many sentences as possible about their families. The aim was to revise vocabulary, especially the less popular words, so I asked them to write atypical sentences in order to prepare for the next step. Some of the students brought their family photos and when the preparation time was over, I asked each of the students to say one sentences about a photo on the screen, repeating previous sentences wasn’t allowed. So each student got a random picture and they had to improvise to some extent, not simply read the sentences they wrote. The sentences they told I wrote down on the board, they copied the ones they didn’t have. We had 2 rounds of such picture-sentence matching (15 minutes).

Then I reminded of the aim – to prepare for writing an essay and that writers present information in a logical and structured way, even in Chinese. The next step was to group the sentences. Since the students aren’t familiar with abstract notions in Chinese and can’t give names to categories, I asked them to use questions for naming the categories, eg, not ‘age’ but ‘how old are you?’, not ‘eating habits’ but ‘what do you eat?’. I wrote the questions on the board, they copied. I insisted on copying whatever new information they saw on the board, because they need to train writing skills and need a stock of sentences for the future use. This took us 10 minutes.  

Grouping made them revise the vocabulary and grammar once again. I would agree that the task itself mainly focused on linguistic aims rather than thinking ones. After having grouped the sentences on the board I asked the students to write more sentences individually (5 minutes). And again they had to read them trying not to repeat what had been said before. Each new sentence we either added to an existing category or made a new category-question (10 minutes). The students copied the sentences into their notebooks.

At the end of the activity each student had to say one sentence that would show the uniqueness of their families (5 minutes). It was nice to hear that the majority found something atypical to say.  

Teacher’s role: I was the pusher and time controller during these lessons. Since the aim was to revise as much as possible I concentrated on speed more than on correctness, the latter was not bad, by the way. We had some trouble with questions, and here I applied the same technique as usually – reminded them of the algorithm of asking questions, which is ‘before asking a question think what the possible answer is and then use the answer’s word order for building the question’. If they still said a question in a wrong way, I asked them to give the answer, wrote it on the board and asked to substitute necessary words.

Overall reflection on the task: for the first time I tried to use the ENV model. I can’t say that the students understood what we were doing and why, but their essays about their families demonstrate positive trends – there are paragraphs, the ideas are fresh – contents are a bit more creative than usually. It was Step 2 of the Thinking Framework. I think I should share the best essays and discuss how grouping sentences helped to write a good essay, this might be Step 3.