Family Feud for Language Learning

There's nothing like a little healthy competition to get adult language learners involved in class! Well, maybe chocolate, but for now we'll stick with competition. And what makes competition even better? When the students themselves have influence on the material!

I discovered this several years ago while teaching Spanish at The Pennsylvania State University. I had always created review games for my students on a regular basis, but until then I had always based the content of the games on what I thought the students should study, or on what would be covered in the exam. Makes sense, right? Well, at PSU I decided to take a new approach, I used the reports generated for me by the students' online homework to identify areas where students were committing the most errors, and I based the content of the Jeopardy-style review games on those areas. The students responded very positively to this new approach.

So, what has this got to do with Family Feud? Well, in Family Feud the content of the game comes from a survey. This is actually why I have normally avoided creating Family Feud-style games, because creating them requires involvement from more than just myself. And, as anyone who has tried to get volunteer assistance knows, it's hard to come by.

This semester I wanted to give it another go, so I had my students themselves complete the survey. This way I could more or less assure that the spirit of volunteerism would prevail. Moreover, I was able to make participation in both the survey and the game itself pedagogically relevant. Here's how I did it with the content from our textbook chapter that covers the arts (vocabulary) and hypotheses (grammar):

Preparation:

1.      Generate list of questions for students to answer. The questions should use the target vocabulary but should not use the hypothesis structure. An example can be found here. You should give the students a few days to complete the form.

2.      Collect the students’ answers and determine which answers are the four most common for each question. For ties, google the results and order them according to the number of hits.

3.      Generate a question using the hypothesis structure for each item (I personally made sure to never repeat any verbs). Fill out the FamilyFeud PowerPoint template with these questions and the ordered answers.

4.      Print out an answer sheet using the option to print nine slides per page.

Execution:

1.      Divide the class into groups of around four students. All students should put their textbooks away.

2.      Open the PowerPoint but leave it in “Normal” mode (do NOT enter “Presentation” mode.)

3.      Randomly pick a group to go first.

4.      Read the question.

5.      The group can discuss and then one student must answer using the hypothesis structure. (The student who answers for each group should rotate throughout the course of the game.)

6.      Limit the time each group has to answer to one minute.

7.      If the student answers with one of the answers (check the answer sheet) delete the appropriate rectangle and give that group the number of points indicated on the rectangle.

8.      The next group then gets a chance to answer the same question.

9.      Continue until all groups have had a chance to attempt to answer the question or until there are no answers left to reveal.

10.  The group that answered second is now asked the next question. This way you rotate which group gets to go first with each question.

11.  When you run out of time and/or questions the game is over and the group with the highest score wins.

Results:

1.      I used this activity in the spring of 2014 with my SPN 610 class. My students responded very positively to this activity! They were very excited and engaged, and were especially excited to see whether their personal answers had won a rank in the game. I also noticed:

a.       Students were often eagerly asking each other what different vocabulary words meant.

b.      At the beginning of the game many students were having difficulty with the hypothesis structure, but by the end they were using much better and with little/no help.

c.   Unlike what often happens with my activities, there were no students who were not actively engaged in this game.

2.      During the spring of 2014 I also shared this activity with my colleagues who were also teaching SPN 610. One of them sent me an email letting me know that "My class loved the game!", and another referred to me as “Family Feud” with a big smile on his face when passing me in the hall. I take this as evidence that this activity worked with more than just my class.

Preparing for College/University Foreign Language Exams

I know that there is already a lot of advice floating around the web about how to prepare for exams, and I'd like to add my two cents. Granted, some classes, like high school calculus, don't require much studying. If you just pay attention in class and do the homework, you'll be ready for the exam. But there are some classes that its good to study for, such as second semester college Spanish. When it comes to studying for a foreign language exam, there are some good ideas, some okay ideas, and some bad ideas.

Bad ideas:
1. Staring at lists of vocabulary, grammar rules, etc. Unless you have photographic memory, staring at lists isn't going to do you much good, unless you can really quickly reproduce the lists on the back of your exam when you first start the exam (okay idea). Most foreign college-level foreign language exams these days are designed around the concept of Communicative Language Learning, so you're mostly going to see fill-in-the-blanks and short-answer questions. When you stare a list you are memorizing the content in a very specific context (a list), and it can be very hard for your brain to apply information stored in lists into questions that require you to understand the context.
2. Not going to class, not doing homework, not paying attention in class, not practicing the language in class, etc. Basically, if you don't do what your instructor tells you to do leading up to the exam, you're shooting yourself in the foot. If they are a good instructor then the exam will be formatted very similarly to the stuff they have been having you do in class and at home.

Okay ideas:
1. Going back over stuff that you did in class and at home. This is okay because you will be studying the content in the type of context in which it will be presented in the exam. However, its not a great method because you have already done it (hopefully). Which means that you already know the right answer (again, hopefully). So its very easy for you to not pay full attention to the context of each item while studying. You will probably find yourself moving very quickly and confidently through the previously completed assignments.
2. Cramming. Okay, no matter how much I hate to admit it, cramming can help...somewhat. Cramming tends to be especially useful if your instructor doesn't use much of an imagination, and you can quickly jot down on the back of your exam the stuff that you have crammed right when the exam starts, before you get confused by the questions on the exam.
3. Look for practice exercises on the web. This one tends to be hit or miss for several reasons. First, you may wind up spending a whole lot of time just looking for the darn things. Second, they may not be formatted the same way you know that your instructor will format the items on your exam. Third, there is usually no guarantee as to the quality of the activities. Sure, there's probably some good stuff out there for studying just about anything in any language. But there's also a lot of crap.
4. Flash cards. Yet another traditional method that isn't bad, but isn't great. Flash cards are better than staring at lists, because you see the items out of order, and you don't see the answer right next to the question. However, they are still repetitious, which means that your brain will tend to have a harder time generalizing the stuff you practice into new contexts, and they are usually not formatted like the items on your exam will be.

Good ideas:
1. Prepare your body. Seriously. You'd be amazed how much better you can do on an exam when you have been eating the right foods, keeping yourself hydrated with water, and getting enough sleep. This page is a good resource on how to do this step.
2. Practice using what you'll be tested on. If you're exam is going to be covering the pluperfect subjunctive and vocabulary related to car parts, then practice making sentences (that make sense) using the pluperfect subjunctive and car parts. My favorite way to do this is to take your flash cards (okay idea) and put them in stacks: one for grammar, and one for vocabulary. Then you draw two cards at random (one from each pile), and write a sentence using those cards. I suggest that you do this a couple dozen times, and then take what you've done to your instructor's office hours and ask them to let you know how you're doing (i.e. where you screwed up.)
3. Doing the opposite of Bad Idea #2. If its already exam time, then it is too late to do this step, but if you still have a while, then you might seriously think about doing what your instructor expects you to do both in and out of class. If you don't believe me, you haven't tried it.