Mixin’ It Up: Ways to Pair Students with New Partners

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to encourage your students to converse with a variety of speaking partners by using fun and unique partnering strategies.

Image source: https://sites.google.com/a/fpsct.org/iar-school-counseling/mix-it-up-day

I’ll often tell my students that they should ‘mix it up’ and find someone new to talk to. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they end up talking to the same people they always do. For me to admonish them would be hypocritical, as I too am guilty of this: I tend to sit in the same chair in the staff room, talking to the same people, every lunch time. Therefore, as the teacher, it’s my responsibility to give them opportunities and encouragement to meet and work with new people. However, there are more fun ways to do this than telling them to “find someone new” and hoping for the best!

Methods for Mixing Up Partners:

Clock Partners

This is great at the beginning of a semester when students are getting to know each other. Students are given a ‘clock’, and make appointments with another student. For beginner students I’ll have a script on the board that will be something like:

“Hi, my name is ________. Can I be your ____ o’clock clock partner?”

“Hi ________ , I’m _________. I’d be happy to be your ____ o’clock clock partner”

“Hi ________ , I’m _________. Unfortunately, I cannot be your ____ o’clock clock partner. How about ____ o’clock?”

Once everyone has their ‘appointments’ they keep the sheet in their binder. Then, when we have conversation prompts, I’ll tell students to find their _____ o’clock partner. When I’m particularly on the ball, I’ll keep track of which ‘times’ I’ve already called so that they visit with everyone prior to repeating the time. Two problems I’ve had with this are a) if a student is away, (but you can easily toss them into a group of three), or b) you have less than 24 students in the class, (which you can remedy by having certain ‘times’ blocked off).

RESOURCE: Clock Partners sheet (French)

RESOURCE: Link to the many, many clock partners sheets to choose from (English)

Find someone who

 Give an arbitrary criterion so that students can reasonably find someone who fits. For example, “find someone who has the same color shirt as you” or “find someone who also does or does not have glasses”. You can use less obvious physical cues that force students to chat, like “find someone who has the same pet as you” or “find someone who has a similar hobby to yours”.

Take a card (any card!)*

All you need is a deck of cards. Have as many cards as students, and hand them out randomly. Then say “find the person with the same number card”. This one is great because if you want to start with a group of two, and then transition to a group of four, you can start with “find the person with the same number and color card as you” (ex. the six of diamonds and six of hearts are now partners) and then “find the group with the same number but different color as you and your partner and make a group of four” (ex. the six of diamonds and six of hearts are now also partners with the six of spades and six of clubs). I had some comically large playing cards that were a hit and less likely to get lost.

Take a postcard (any postcard!)*

I bet if you ask around, there’s people with postcards they’ve never sent (I certainly have great intentions and poor follow-through for postcards when on vacation). Take the postcards (or really any image) and chop them in half. Randomly distribute the half-cards to students and then they need to ‘match’ up with their new partner. If you have an old game of ‘memory’ for kids, that would be even easier.  

Vocabulary Partners*

This is a way to review vocabulary and find a partner (mwahahahaha!) Half the students are given a word in the target language. The other half are given either a picture that matches one of the vocab words or a matching vocab word in the L1 (If you’re interested, I have a blog post about how vocab learning is one of the times using students’ L1 in the classroom is beneficial). They must find the person who is their match, and that person is their partner. You can also do this as an introduction to new vocabulary, which takes considerably longer, but it’s interesting to see students using inferences to guess the meaning of the word and helping pair each other up.

Walk ‘til the Music Stops

Students wander around the room while the music is playing. When the music stops, whoever is closest to them is their partner. In some classes the students clump together to guarantee they’ll end up with their friends, which means I don’t do this with them again. However, some classes love the chance to get up and walk (and dance around!), so participate in the way it was intended in order to keep doing it.

Handshakes

 This one is good for the beginning of the year and it is definitely a pre-Covid activity (but hopefully we’ll be back to this kind of interaction again!) Instruct students to find someone, introduce themselves and shake that person’s hand. Then, find someone new and shake their hand. Then find someone new and shake their hand. By the fifth time they’ll have started branching out to new people, which is when you say “okay, the person’s hand that you just shook is your partner”. I like to switch it up by having a different ‘hello’ task each time, so I’ll use a variety of:

Image source: https://www.mashupmath.com/blog/handshake-math-challenge?rq=handshake

  1. Shake the person’s hand

  2. Fist bump

  3. High-five

  4. Low-five

  5. Elbow tap

  6. Bow

  7. Train-handshake (I usually need to demonstrate this one, but you grab the other person’s elbow and saw your arms back and forth saying “choo choo!”. This gets a lot of laughs, and is usually where I stop and say “this person is your partner”)

This is also an opportunity to talk about cultural mores around greetings. For example, in France it is very common to do La Bise (cheek kisses) when seeing someone, even for the first time! Depending on which region you are in, you start on the right or the left, and give either one, two, three, four, or even five, kisses. (The English comedian Paul Taylor has a hilarious video about this, though there is some swearing.) I don’t feel comfortable asking my students to se boujouter (as they say in Normandy), as culturally in North America, this is not a common greeting for people who are not already pretty intimate. However, it does spark some interesting conversation!

 

* If you have the time and energy (or, have an eager student volunteer) you can tape the cards or a slip of paper with a vocab word under their chairs or desks. There’s something magical about being told “check under your seat!” and grabbing something!

 

How do you pair students up to make sure they’re talking with new people? Feel free to share in the comments!

4/3/2 Fluency Technique

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help your students become more confident and fluent speakers when talking about a chosen topic using the 4/3/2 technique.

What is the 4/3/2 technique?

 Dr. Paul Nation makes the point that “At every level of language proficiency, learners should try to be fluent with what they already know.” Therefore, he created an activity that helps students focus on meaning, speed, and volume with a familiar text. This is an activity I use with students to help increase confidence and fluency, and also encourage solid reading comprehension when it’s paired with a text.  

How does it work?

  • Step One: Students become ‘experts’ in a particular topic. This can mean they are about to talk about the subject of their project, or what book they are reading, or the main idea of a small article they read. A resource I recommend for this type of activity are magazines by Rubicon Publishing. They have sets in French and English with ‘Top 10 [blank]’: Top ten spies, top ten sports showdowns, top ten outrageous hoaxes, etc. I had access to class sets of 30, so the whole class would read on the same topic. I would assign 3 students to read each article together, then they would be the ‘experts’ in their entry and would find someone not in their group to talk to for the next steps.

  • Step Two: Student A pairs up with Student B and then talks about their topic for four minutes. Student B cannot interrupt, even to ask questions. Once the four minutes are up, Student B gets to speak for four minutes. This time, Student A patiently listens.

  • Step Three: Student A now pairs up with Student C and repeats the process. However, this time, they only speak for three minutes.

  • Step Four: Student A is now with Student D but speaking for two minutes.

There are some great videos to watch to learn more. Paul Nation delivered a presentation on developing fluency in reading and includes an explanation of his 4/3/2 method. There’s also this video by IELTS Master that explains the activity directly to students.

Image soure: https://soundpracticelanguagelearning.com/2020/04/11/whatisoralfluency/

 Why does this work?

 There are three reasons why this exercise is more valuable than a turn-and-talk and not a waste of 9 minutes:

  1. Different audience: the student doesn’t feel the pressure to add new information, because the topic is new to the listener each time.

  2. Repetition: each time the student repeats their talk they become more confident and have less difficulty in accessing the vocabulary needed

  3. Time reduction: as the student becomes more fluent in their speech, they need less time. As the time reduces at the same rate, they don’t have any pressure to fill the rest of the time with new information.

A study of ten randomly selected ELL participants in Algeria found that “repeating the same talk three times yields positive effects on enhancing’ fluency maximizing students’ speaking speed, accuracy, and conciseness as well as reducing their hesitation and unwillingness” .

How can I change it up?

For lower-level students Christopher Redmond uses the same principles to improve the yes/no game. For higher-level students Olya Sergeeva adds mind-mapping with related English-language expressions. It can also be used to help students practice for presenting their Genius Hour projects or any other non-scripted presentations.

 

Have you ever done this activity with your students? It was new to me as a French teacher, but seems to be pretty popular with ELL teachers. Feel free to share in the comments!

Warm-Up: Find 5 Things

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to start class with a fun, visual warm-up game that enhances students’ vocabulary knowledge.

The “5 things” game is one that was modeled for me at a professional development session, and I used it the very next day in my classroom! My students like it, it’s easy to explain, there are literally infinite variations on it, and it somehow manages to be both competitive AND team building!

STEP ONE: Students are put into pairs (or threes if needed). They do not need to be sitting close to their ‘partner’, in fact, it’s better if they are not!

STEP TWO: The teacher puts up an image. Literally any image, as long as there are at least five things (hence the name) that can be identified.

STEP THREE: Ultimately, the goal of the game is to gain points by having the same five words as your partner to describe the picture (one point per answer, maximum five points per round). Once the image is revealed, I’ll give students a few minutes to write down their answers silently and secretly. So, for example, if I show this picture, a student might write down:

Image still from: The Princess and the Frog (Disney)

  1. Princess

  2. Frog

  3. Night

  4. Kiss

  5. Tiara

This can be made harder or easier, more focused on grammar or less. For example, the first image I used was pretty simplistic. I’m not saying you should use Where’s Waldo, but an image of a Haitian market, for example, might make the game more difficult! If the parameters I give are just to have the same words, I always have the rule that all nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are all allowed EXCEPT for colors! Unless it’s a beginner-level class, having to rely on colors seems a bit like cheating to me. However, you can definitely make this more complex by putting stricter parameters around the image. For example, I may say that students need to find two nouns, two verbs, and one adjective.  Therefore, the imaginary student’s list might look like this:

1.     NOUN: a frog

2.     NOUN: a princess

3.     VERB: to kiss

4.     VERB: to blush

5.     ADJECTIVE: romantic

If you’re working on a particular grammatical construction, then you can put up an image and say “find five of the same verbs in the imperfect form”. Or if there is an image that involves a lot of unit vocabulary you can say “find five of the same words (doesn’t matter what part of speech), but spelling counts!”

STEP FOUR: Partners tally up the points (the silent and secret part is now over). Using the above first example, if Student A wrote princess, night, frog, kiss, tiara and Student B wrote princess, frog, kiss, gloves, dress then they would have 3 out of 5 possible points because they chose three of the same words. It’s then the honor system for students to share out how many points they have. Sometimes I’ll do multiple images and we’ll have a ‘winner’ for that day’s total. Other times, I’ll do an image a day for a week and we’ll have the ‘winner’ for that week’s total.

STEP FIVE: Share out some the answers! It’s a great way to build vocabulary for the rest of the class, and some of the answers can be really fun or surprising. My favorite question to ask is “what is a word that your partner had that you didn’t?” because those are usually the more unique words and students are more likely to share their partner’s answer in order to showcase their partner’s brilliance than they are their own (though that’s high school students, elementary students might be more open to sharing their own thoughts!)

STEP SIX: Continue using it as an intermittent warm-up for class and change it up however you see fit. I like using themed images (example, fairy tales for my fairy tale unit) but as long as the image is appropriate, why not use it! Like I mentioned above, I’ll put different parameters around the words they need to find and sometimes I give the ultimate difficult instruction: find five words that your partner DOES NOT have! Students only get points if their words are totally unique… so they really need to dig deep into their vocabulary knowledge stores. The other thing you can then do is use the same picture, now that they have a bunch of vocabulary at the ready, for a quickwrite.

 Some examples of dynamic pictures to use as prompts:

Have you ever played this game or a variation on it? Are there any constrictions or images you prefer using? Share in the comments!