Imagine you’re a French student going to study abroad this summer. Your host family sends you an email asking you to introduce yourself. What do you do?
That’s the Quickfire challenge I present to my students in this lesson plan.
The Lesson: Welcoming Imperfection
If you haven’t heard of a Quickfire, it’s essentially a fast-paced learning challenge. Using a time constraint, Quickfires aren’t expected to end in perfect products. It’s about accepting what’s good enough and doing the best you can with what you have.
Oddly enough, it’s a useful metaphor for learning a new language.
When I studied abroad, my host family greeted me at the train station with some bisous on my cheeks, then they started speaking to me in French. I had no textbook to guide me and no classmate to tell me the word I’m thinking of — it was just me with my broken French, American accent, and limited vocabulary.
In your second language, a simple tell-me-about-yourself conversation isn’t easy. It requires thinking on your feet and accepting imperfect outcomes, just like Quickfires.
Imperfection is a part of learning a new language, but it’s hard to convince students that imperfection is welcome in a school environment. The fear of mistaken grammar, forgotten words, and mispronunciation makes many students nervous to practice speaking French out loud.
Here’s the problem: if students aren’t willing to speak their broken French, they’ll never improve it. You can’t learn a French accent by thinking about it in your head, and you can’t have a conversation in French if you’re unwilling to speak.
My host family taught me to be proud of my French voice, even if it’s not perfect. Now I want to teach this lesson to my students. The Famille D’Accueil Quickfire Challenge permits play and welcomes imperfection by bringing experiential learning to the classroom (Ito et al., 2013).
The Technology: Supporting Imperfection
If the students’ challenge is to welcome their imperfect French voice, then my challenge is to show them I value those voices. I turned to the TPACK framework to create a harmony of content, pedagogy, and technology in this lesson .
I wanted students to use their family, leisure, and question vocabulary to practice speaking authentic French dialogues with their classmates — all while learning to overcome perfectionism.
VoiceThread proved to be a useful tech tool for this lesson because it’s a platform for having personal conversations at your own pace, which is basically every new language learner’s dream. (Pause and rewind buttons? Yes, please.)
By creating and viewing the VoiceThread presentations, every student will speak French, hear French, and respond to French, but they can take time to process every part of the conversation. They can record and re-record; they can listen and re-listen. Some students will comment on a dozen photos, but some will only comment on three.
Still, all of them will speak with their French voice, and I’ll love hearing them.
They’ll be surprised, just like I was, to find that the more they speak their imperfect French, the less imperfect it will become.
References
Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., . . . Watkins, S. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design (summary) (Rep.). Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.
Laura Allen 