German tennis

By R. Bates, Assistant Lead Teacher of MFL

One of the challenges of the new specification is improvising spoken language and speaking at naturally quick pace. I decided to try and practise these skills by using a tennis-themed lesson on Sports Day.

Students got into pairs and sat across the table from each other (or as it got more exciting, stood up and threw in a larger space.). They threw a ball (ping-pong in this case, thanks for the loan Mr McCann!) to each other mimicking a tennis rally. Each throw was accompanied by a word or phrase. The winner at the end of each game received a point, with the final winner reaching 6 points (i.e. winning the set.)

The games I used were –

·         word association (positive adjective, negative adjective, negative etc) Whoever couldn’t ‘return’ a word, lost.

·         sentence building – one word per person. The person who couldn’t continue using the sentence (using a connective, adding an extra detail) lost.

·         grammar – present tense verb to past participle (losing student unable to answer).A:  I play à B: I have played. I watch à A: I have watched.

·         English to German translation (structure as above)

·         conversation about tennis celebrities. Again, losing students were the ones who could not keep the conversation going by asking another question or extending an opinion.

Any tie breaks were decided by who could produce an ‘ace’ i.e. a fantastic grammatically complex sentence, best sentence judged by me.

I found this lesson worked for the more kinaesthetic students who otherwise would’ve struggled to sit and talk in German for an hour. However, all students were more motivated to speak, and the competitive element really helped them practise new assessment criteria for responding to unprepared language without them realising.