Transforming Vocabulary Review Into an Active Game

At Albert Hill Middle School in Richmond, VA, middle school Spanish teacher Jamie Midyette organizes her classes into story units, where the stories she chooses become the basis for learning new vocabulary and sentence structures. At the beginning of each unit, she shares a story (often a video from YouTube) that she has broken into individual illustrations and images. Once the students practice the vocabulary and learn the progression of the story—a process that unfolds over multiple class periods—she introduces a vocabulary review game called Running Dictation that presents a new challenge and pulls all the language skills into a sort of relay race.

Students are paired up, and each group receives a handout that lists all of the sentences from the story, but they’re all out of order. Ideally, the students go outside—but in the case of bad weather, a hallway will suffice. Midyette scatters clipboards holding individual images from the story, each with a randomly assigned letter, a few dozen yards away. When Midyette says “go,” one student in each pair runs to an image, studies it, and then returns to their partner to describe it in Spanish. The writer has to find the sentence on the handout and write the corresponding letter next to it. The students then change roles, and keep going until they’ve matched each sentence with a letter. The pairs are then challenged to number the sentences in the order they appear in the story.

This friendly competition asks students to use many of their language learning skills—they must speak clearly to their partner, using the vocabulary they’ve learned from the story. Their partner must listen closely and recall the vocabulary.  And they must read the sentences carefully to match the correct letter. An added bonus? Because their partner is depending on them for information, students are motivated to understand the text and convey it clearly.

Students love the chance to get out of the classroom and use their sprinting skills as well as their language skills. And Midyette sees dividends in the students’ engagement every time she plays the game for vocabulary review. Running Dictation helps students to recall vocab and structure sentences—all while collaborating with classmates and boosting their energy.

Running Dictation is a beloved world languages activity originated by Jason Fritze and adapted by many teachers over the years, including Michele Whaley, Martina Bex of The Comprehensible Classroom, and Sarah Breckley. The worksheets seen in the video were sourced from La Familia Loca PLC, a professional learning community run by Anabelle Allen of La Maestra Loca, and the Simon's Cat story slides from Simon Tofield's comics were adapted from a presentation by Allison Litten.

To find more games for world languages classrooms, check out the Edutopia video “Motivating Teens With Classroom Competitions.”