A Very Cheeky Activity

 This activity can be sold to pupils as "What to do if you don't know what the key word in the question is." I wouldn't encourage pupils to pick a 90 word or 150 word writing task if they don't know what one of the bullet points is, but it's reassuring (at the early stages) to think that you are equipped to deal with even that situation.

We imagine a question with a made up word in. And then we create our best answer. Here it is the verb "siblear". A made up word, based on the name of one of the pupils in the class. For the purposes of this post, we could call him or her "Sibbles".

Cuando vas a la playa, ¿te gusta siblear?  - When you go to the beach, do you like to sibble?

Of course, we are not going to say we like to "siblear" because we don't know what it means. And that could be embarrassing. So we say we don't like it much. And if we don't like it much, then we can say what we prefer to do. Then we can say under what circumstances we might have to do it. Then we say what we were doing, what someone suggested, what we preferred, what we ended up doing and what we would have preferred to do.

And we have a lovely answer, with great Spanish, convincing personal detail, humour, confilict and resolution.

Of course, I have had pupils in the speaking exam who needed the confidence to give an answer to a question they didn't quite understand. Like the candidate who was asked their opinion of la corrida de toros and who probably wouldn't have said, "It's fun for all the family" if they had known it was bullfighting. But this isn't really about that. It is really about creating a model answer.

Writing the paragraph summarising it above, I couldn't help thinking about the story, "If you give a mouse a cookie..." (If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. If you give a mouse a glass of milk, he's going to...) Because once you've said what you don't like, you ARE going to say what you prefer. And once you've said what you prefer, you ARE going to use an if sentence to explore under what circumstances you can/can't do it. And once you've used one if sentence, you ARE going to use another one to explore the opposite alternative. And (going back to the start) once you've given your opinion, you ARE going to give someone else's opinion. And once you've established a conflict of opinions, you ARE going to give a specific example, saying what you wanted to do. And if you use direct speech to say what someone else says they want to do, you ARE going to say what you said in reply. And you will say what happened as an upshot. And if this is mildly disappointing, you will say what you would have preferred to have done.

And then your answer has written itself. Almost as soon as you have finished saying that you don't like something, the rest of the answer just unwinds in front of you. Like the elephant in the block of marble waiting for the sculptor to reveal it, your answer was there all along waiting for you to say it.

That's the power of this activity. It's not really about a nonsense answer in an emergency. It's about having an eye to create something logical, coherent, a work of beauty from the materials at your disposal.