Friday’s Cambridge webinar featured Dennis Johnson, author of the Ventures series, speaking about collaborative activities in advanced adult ESL classes.
Dennis began by explaining that collaboration was an increasingly important skill for twenty-first century learners – so important that learning expert Bernie Trilling had identified it as one of the seven skills essential for society’s future workforce.
He then shared some activities available to download for free from the Ventures website, demonstrating how such collaborative activities can be used to familiarise learners with academic language. Students can interview each other in pairs on the content of a listening passage, or ask questions more widely of the rest of their class. You can hand out ‘conversation cards’ containing short scenarios and questions for discussion. (You can see one of these below.)
With jigsaw reading activities, you give learners different parts of a text, and they have to ask each other questions in order to piece together the whole story. Alternatively, you can give them three separate but complementary pieces and get them to pool their information by working – and speaking – together.
Dennis also offered some suggestions as to how teachers can encourage better collaboration between learners. You should make sure to model the activity for learners, and ensure that there’s room for you – and learners – to move around the classroom. With many of these activities, it’s important that students cannot see their classmates’ pieces of paper, so you should consider sitting students facing each other, or placing a file folder as a visual barrier between them.
To hear more of Dennis’s tips for collaborative activities, press play on the video below. To download some of the activities he mentioned, visit our Ventures website.