The Ticker Tape: An Activity for Teaching Reported Speech

Just as the above image suggests, teachers have to look for ways to theoreticize their teaching for differentiated learning in their lesson plans.  That is why our Preparatory program has a very strong formative assessment process, that not only has us, the English teachers, looking to continuously assess our students, but also we have the students self-assess through the use of Can Do Statements and monthly Interviews.  This not only leads to a more autonomous environment, but also it gives us the teachers a stronger evaluative tool that allows all stake-holders in the Preparatory Program to know exactly where they are on the teaching and learning curves throughout the year.

For us, Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences plays a significant role in how we determine activities in and out of class.  The activity we want to share with you today came as a result of being in the school photocopy room at the same time as a primary school teacher who was having A3 photocopies made.  David noticed that there were 100 perfectly cut “ticker-tape” sized pieces of paper being discarded to the paper-bin.  He retrieved them and our creative juices started to flow.  Since we are doing Reported Speech in our class, we thought it a perfect opportunity to have the kids use these bits of paper as the Realia  for expressing themselves in the proper use of the aforementioned grammar.

In line with five of Gardner's identified intelligences: Visual-Spatial; Bodily-Kinesthetic; Interpersonal; Intrapersonal; and Linguistic  the process for the activity is outlined below.   

First of all, we separated the pieces of paper into 5 strips for each student.  This took only a few minutes of our time to complete. 

Next, Brentson is holding up one strip to see how the activity would be looked at by the students (of course with a smiling face):

Next, David and I thought about how the activity would be realized.

WRITING:  Students to write down a statement on one side of the ticker-tape.

IMPORTANT:  They should also place a SECRET CODE on the ticker-tapes so they can identify them on their return

LISTENING: Students to ask 5 different students in their own class for that statement.

GRAMMAR: Students use the appropriate DIRECT SPEECH statement e.g. MrM said, “He loves Howard Gardener’s Multiple Intelligences.”

CREATIVITY: Students have to access their own creative-cognitive space to offer up a quality statement.

KINESTHETIC: Students have to get up out of their chairs, engage in L2 to get the information.

LISTENING 2 : Close listening so as to get the proper information to write down.

Papers are then returned to the teacher, who then goes to the (an)other class to share the ticker-tape statements with those students.

The papers now swapped and taken ownership by different students (all anonymous to avoid any feelings of “friend” over “peer”)

WRITING/GRAMMAR : Students now convert the statements into Reported Speech watching to transpose carefully and with correct Punctuation.

Students return their Direct & Reported Speech Ticker-Tapes to the teacher, who then returns them to the other class.

SPEAKING/LISTENING/GRAMMAR : Students report what their peers have written about their sentences and correct where necessary.

We have also produced a tutorial on Blendspace that clearly lays out the steps of this activity, and you are more the welcome to use it in your own classroom.  Click the image below to reach the tutorial...

As you can see this activity encroaches upon, and utilizes a lot of what Gardner believes in (as do we).  The fact we are getting them up, walking around and using many skills associated with language learning means it is a fully-rounded collaborative activity we believe is so beneficial for any level of student learning language.  You can also note there is absolutely No ICT involved and that is what we feel strongly about:   

ICT-ELT is ONLY a Tool, NOT a Solution