Luckily, I stumbled on to a simple activity that can be used in a variety of different ways and can be adapted to whatever your objectives are. This activity generates a lot of informal written language between students, which is unusual in typical writing assignments, and it requires a lot of negotiation for meaning. This activity, my personal favorite, is using Yahoo! Messenger Conferencing feature.

The first time I gave this assignment, I assigned teams of 3-4, with one person assigned as a team leader. The day before our lab I introduced a topic, specifically, a quote related to stereotypes that was challenging to understand. Small groups discussed possible meanings of the quote but we only spent about 10-15 minutes on it. Then in lab, students were given the same quote and asked to discuss it in a conference format through Yahoo! Messenger. It was the responsibility of all group members to make sure each person understood the meaning of the quote and could explain it and give examples. Students were not allowed to ask me for meanings or clarification until they had discussed it with their group. They were also not allowed to talk about it, even though they were sitting close to each other. The group leader was responsible for making sure each member participated in the conversation and for printing the conversation for the teacher at the end of class. I was amazed at how seriously the leaders took their responsibilities and how all students worked together in this format. But not everything was perfect yet.

I found some students did not like the group format and it was difficult for them to keep up with faster typing students. One of the other skills I hadn’t thought of was turn-taking, and some students had a difficult time knowing when to interject their comments. Some just had difficulty keeping up with the reading of other’s comments and were too slow to respond. So, for those students I created another assignment for a later lab where Yahoo! Messenger was used again, but this time using the instant message (chat) feature. Students were assigned partners and, since there were only two involved in the conversation, both had to participate. This gave the students who didn’t enjoy the conference activity a chance to feel successful in another format.

Once students were finished with their conversations, one student was responsible for printing out the conversations and turning them in to me. There is potential to develop additional activities from these conversations. For example, you could use language examples to discuss grammar or idioms in another class, or formal versus informal language. The possibilities are endless.