Nice with Dice

 This week, I realised I have enough dice for pupils in some groups to have one each. So as long as they don't touch them all as they choose their favourite one from the tub, we can do dice speaking activities without worrying about sharing dice.

With Year 8, we did a scaffolded speaking and writing activity. Pupils roll the dice (never say die) which gives them the words for each section. For example throwing a 1 would give them j'aime and then throwing a 4 would follow that with voir mes amis and so on. Until you have a long random sentence made up of all 9 chunks.

J'aime voir mes amis mais je dois faire des achats dans le parc parce que je n'aime pas visiter des musées.

They do this with a partner, saying the sentence they are making in French and in English. They have to decide if their sentence makes sense or not, and put their hand up to tell me if they get one that they claim works.

I wrote in a previous post about how we use this phase of just producing French, before turning our attention to curating meaning and coherence more carefully.

After the speaking activity, I take in the dice, and ask the pupils to use the sheet to write sentences in their books. They have to write a mixture of ones that make sense and ones that are "correct" but random. It is then their partner's job (or the teacher's job, when they mark the books) to spot the sensible ones. You can see me setting up this activity in this lockdown teaching video.

Asking pupils to write grammatically correct but nonsensical sentences is interesting. We do it just to practice processing a high volume of French and producing longer sentences. We all know what happens when pupils focus on wanting to say something specific and end up not practising saying anything at all. But actually, two things tend to happen. Either pupils really love the creativity of making nonsense sentences. Or they have a strong desire to make it make sense. Both of these are great, and lead us on to the next step of self expression and creating meaning.

There are examples of these dice activities on the ALL London Branch talks archive page in French, Spanish and German, which you can adapt. The sheet is also useful for the "Consequences" activity where pupils write one of the choices from the first set of 6, fold it over, and pass the paper to the next pupil... who writes one from the next set of 6 choices, folds it over, and passes it on. Then at the end they unfold and read what they have written. This guest post on the OUP blog has one for writing a letter to Father Christmas. You can also use the sheet for a speaking activity where a pupil selects a long sentence using one from each set of choices, then their partner has to guess their sentence a chunk at a time.

The next step up using dice, is to use them for conjunctions. The pupil starts talking (using the Keep Talking sheet). J'aime le sport. At the end of each chunk, they roll the dice for a conjunction. So if they rolled a 2 they would use "because" and carry on: J'aime le sport parce que je peux jouer au rugby avec mes amis. Then again, and again, and again. J'aime le sport parce que je peux jouer au rugby avec mes amis mais je n'aime pas nager surtout si je dois nager avec ma famille alors je voudrais jouer au rugby par exemple le week-end si je peux...

Again, there is an element of incoherence thanks to the random element of the dice. The focus is on keeping talking, extending, practising, processing. Pupils DO pay attention to whether it makes sense and whether the sentence becomes incoherent. But meanwhile they are practising talking and talking spontaneously.

I have had pupils ask me if they can take the dice into their Speaking exam, because they understand that it helps them extend and develop spontaneously. It also makes them think about what order they would logically like to have the conjunctions if they could choose. The 1 - 6 order in the picture above is actually a useful order for constructing an answer. Et just gives more information. Parce que and  surtout si explore reasons. I use par exemple  tactically as a trigger for examples in the past. And alors to trigger examples in the future. And you should keep mais until last, to change the subject once you have said everything you can.

So we do this dice activity at GCSE as well as at KS3. And in the GCSE Speaking Exam, many of my "Questions" are not questions at all, but single word prompts. I will say, "Et?" or "Pour quoi?" or "Alors...?" or "Par exemple..." and the pupils will extend their idea on the spot just as they are used to doing in class. And without the need for me to say, "Now please can you narrate something relevant to this in the past tense." All I have to say is, "Par exemple...?" and the pupils automatically give me an example in the past.

Using dice really seems to get over the problem of pupils not knowing what to say, or wanting to say something that they can't. It gets them producing language in speaking or writing, and actively starts them thinking about meaning and coherence. Then it is the key to interaction with a partner, teacher or examiner in using short prompts to probe for more information and to push them to extend their answers spontaneously.