Written by Julie Pacheco-Toye and Amy Rill 

Every Mode, Every Day: Simple Routines for Building Communicative Skills  

When Julie was in the classroom, one of her own simple personal routines for creating daily lesson plans was to make sure that every single class period included opportunities for her students to listen, read, speak, and write in the target language, even in level 1. It wasn’t always elaborate, but it was always there. As a new teacher, she used an actual checklist on her lesson planning template, and as a veteran teacher, it was a mental checklist that had become a habit. What made it possible was routines. Just like routines for planning and teaching make the workflow easier for teachers, routines that students experience over and over again make it easier for them to engage in that daily practice with each communication skill.  

Here’s an effective activity sequence flow that aligns well with communicative skill building for proficiency and that includes routine opportunities to exercise all four communication skills: 

Step 1: Begin with interpretive listening or reading. 

Ideally, it will be based on an authentic resource, but what’s really important is that the input is contextual and comprehensible. Especially in novice level classes, you’ll want to provide level-appropriate scaffolds and supports. Interpretive routines might include pre-reading or pre-listening anticipation guides, highlighting or circling words or phrases, or using a graphic organizer to identify and organize key information. 

Step 2: Process in writing the information from the interpretive listening or reading. 

After listening, reading, or watching a video, it helps to give students time to process in writing before you ask them to speak. This writing doesn’t need to be complicated or graded. The idea is for them to process the information and begin showing understanding of the input. Scaffolding with sentence frames or useful phrases is a good idea, especially for novice classes. Some routines for presentational writing in novice level classes include writing a list, writing a short message, or writing a short description with hashtags to highlight the main topics. Routines and writing ideas for intermediate students could include incorporating ideas into a short summary, poem, comic strip, song lyrics, or writing an online review based on an authentic advertisement. 

Step 3: Express and share aloud. 

Presentational writing and speaking are natural skills to be paired within a lesson or task sequence. Presentational speaking (one-way, prepared comments) can precede or follow interpersonal communication, but with novice learners, it can help them to be more confident about interpersonal speaking if they can express their thoughts through one-way prepared speaking first. Keep the task directly related to the content of the interpretive task, low-stakes, and level-appropriate; anywhere from single words to complex sentences can suffice. A few simple presentational speaking routines appropriate for novice and intermediate learners alike include think-pair-share, inside-outside circles, and recorded voice memos. 

Step 4: Interact through interpersonal speaking. 

Interpersonal speaking is often more challenging and intimidating for our students than presentational speaking, because it requires them to listen to what the other person is saying, interpret it, and respond to it in the moment. It feels unpredictable because in a truly interpersonal task, you never really know what the other person is going to say, which adds to the cognitive load and raises the affective filter. That is exactly why daily practice for interpersonal communication is absolutely essential for our students to develop skills and confidence. One of the best ways we can help our students become more comfortable with asking and answering questions is by frequent modeling, first teacher to student, and then student to student. Julie’s favorite routine for interpersonal speaking is PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers), in which the teacher asks students questions about themselves related to the ideas in the interpretive task. Amy used this Question Chain routine: once students hear the teacher asking questions, she followed up with a question chain where one student asks the question, another responds and then becomes the asker of the next question. These questions could be listed on the board or screen or printed on a set of cards. Other great routines to incorporate daily interpersonal practice include surveys/questionnaires, and a variety of mingle activities. Both Amy and Julie recommend the mingle activity Musical Conversations, during which the teacher plays music (from the target culture, of course) while students walk around until the music stops, which is the signal for them to stop and chat with the person nearest to them. 

Here’s an example of this sequence for novice level students using resources from EntreCulturas 1: 

• Step 1: Begin with interpretive listening or reading.  

Context: You and a few classmates want to visit a Spanish-speaking country to participate in a summer camp program. You find two advertisements from programs, one in Mexico and one in Spain.  

Task 1: Read the advertisements and identify the following information: What type of camp is it? Who is it for? Where does it take place? 

For this task, we might first have them engage in an anticipatory activity, such as looking at the ads before giving them the context and the task, and asking them what they think these ads might be for. We might also have them list cognates they notice. To help them focus on the requested information, we might create a chart for them to fill out, with only the requested information. 

Task 2: Read the social media profiles about your classmates who want to go with you. Based on the information about them and about the camps, predict which camp would be the first choice for each of them. Again, we might give students a simple chart to complete for this task. Alternatively, if they have their own print or digital copy of the image, you could have them highlight artistic interests in one color and athletic interests in another. 

• Process in writing the information from the interpretive listening or reading.  

Task 1: Write a short message to your new WhatsApp group that you created for the classmates in the group. Introduce yourself, tell them something about your likes and dislikes, and tell them which camp is your favorite. For this task, we would provide students with sentence stems for each of the requested items: “Me llamo ___. Me gusta(n) ___. No me gusta(n) ___. Mi campamento favorito es ___.” 

Task 2: Write a short text message to each of your classmates in the group with a question about information that is not in their social media profiles. For this task, we might provide students with a model to scaffold the task: “Isabela, ¿te gusta jugar deportes?” 

• Express and share aloud. A simple turn and talk or mingle activity in which students share aloud what they wrote for the first writing task above would be a quick and easy way for them to express themselves through presentational speaking. You might ask that they add one more piece of information, such as “Yo soy artista”. You could also have them record themselves reading it and have them send you a voice memo. 
• Interact through interpersonal speaking. A quick survey about their preferred camp, combined with a mingle activity would be a good way to incorporate interpersonal speaking to round out this sequence. You could provide the questions and have students fill in a simple chart with the information they gleaned from speaking with their classmates. For example: “¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Qué te gusta hacer? ¿Cuál es tu campamento favorito?”  For Novice High to Intermediate Low students, you could also prompt them to ask one follow-up question of each classmate they talk to. 

Using the same authentic resources across levels. You’ve probably heard the phrase “Change the task, not the text”. If the curriculum you’re using doesn’t come with a lot of authentic sources of input, it can be time-consuming and overwhelming to find level-appropriate authentic texts. But you can save yourself a lot of time and work by using the same resources across multiple levels. For example, we could also use the same ads from the example sequence above with our intermediate level students, but change the tasks to ask students to identify additional details, make comparisons between the camps, express their preferences including supporting information from the texts, incorporate cultural comparisons between Mexico and Spain, write a mock review of one of the camps, give a spoken argument for or against one of the camps, and negotiate through interpersonal speaking with another student or with a group of students to come to an agreement about which camp to go to.  

Tips for Planning Daily Practice: Regardless of whether your goal is to support building AP-readiness skills beginning in your level 1 classes and throughout every level, or simply to work toward building communicative proficiency from day 1, here are four tips for planning daily communicative practice: 

1. Keep it predictable. Ease some of your students’ cognitive load by decreasing uncertainty about what they’re supposed to be doing. Give them the same structured ways to organize their ideas, the same target language instructions and the same structured classroom routines, so they can focus their attention and energy on the communication. 
2. Provide supports and scaffolding. Especially in novice level classes, supports such as word walls, chat mats, table tents, conversation cards and more help students build confidence and willingness to interact in the target language. Don’t worry too much about “giving” them those words and phrases. With repetition and increasing confidence, they will naturally rely on those supports less and less over time as they acquire the language and skills. With daily practice, they’ll organically move from using those memorized phrases in one specific situation to transferring and applying them to other situations. 
3. Reuse materials and activities. Amy and Julie both love a good graphic organizer, especially one that can be used over and over again, so we used to keep lots of copies of the ones we used most ready at hand. It can be such a time-saver for you to use the same graphic organizers, speaking prompts, conversation cards, images, slide formats, templates and other materials as part of your daily class routine and across levels.  
4. Have fun!  Aren’t we lucky as world language teachers?!?! The world is filled with topics, ideas, products, and perspectives that relate to our target languages and cultures and our curriculum. Our curricula cover such a wide range of topics, that there are always engaging authentic materials like music, social media, images, literature, ads, games, and more that are relevant to our students’ lives. It can be so fun and exciting to watch the world opening up to our students right in front of our eyes. 

 We know that building functional communicative proficiency in a second language doesn’t happen overnight, or even in a year. Our job is to consistently build the communication skills and habits that our students will carry with them from one level to the next in their journey to meeting their own goals. We hope that this blog post has given you some new ideas for planning daily practice in all four communication skills in your world language classes starting in level 1. We invite you to try one new routine this week and also to share your own favorite routines in the comments. 

This blog post was inspired by our Professional Learning Team's various presentations and webinars about building AP^®-readiness skills starting in Level 1. Check out our latest webinar on that topic, "From Novice to AP^®: How to Engage Students at Every Level." You’ll be certain to recognize some of the ideas from this post.