What is it?
Now that you and your students have co-constructed the grammar rule, it is time to practice it within a meaningful context. In a sense, this phase is a bit more like the traditional approach in that it gives students ample opportunities to practice how to form the grammar rule. This phases consists of activities that let the students practice. The key to this phase is that each of the activities all have a common theme (usually tied to the theme of the story in the Presentation phase). Additionally, these practice activities need to allow students to do more than conjugate verbs and fill in blanks. They should include activities that allow students to use language in more meaningful ways.
While the possibilities for extension activities are endless, some examples include (Shrum & Glisan, 2005, p. 199):
1. Information gap activities
2. Role-play situations
3. Dramatizations
4. Games
5. Authentic writing projects
6. Paired interviews
7. Class surveys
8. Out-of-class projects
9. Simulations of real-life situations
Additionally, these activities should be tied to the theme of the story in the Presentation phase. For example, if the story was an authentic oral legend from the the target culture, the extension activities should be related to the legend or to oral legends in general. You could have your students write their own legend, change the ending to the legend in the story, write an extension to the legend, role-play a scene of the story, etc. As long as the extension activities are tied to the main theme of the Presentation phase, the students will be working within a context that is meaningful. It is important to always give your students a reason for completing an activity. Asking students to complete random activities that are unrelated to the theme of a lesson can lower their motivation and seem confusing. Additionally, do not forget that the PACE Model is designed to focus on meaning over form*. Therefore, make sure that your extension activities are designed to have students focus on the meaning of the language they are using. Avoid having students simply conjugate lists of verbs.
The extension phase of the PACE Model will take the most amount of class time. It may, in fact, take place over the course of several days. Since the students are now expected to practice and create their own language using the grammar point, you can spend as much (or as little) time as needed.
How it Contributes to Learning
The extension phase gives students opportunities to actually produce the grammar, so it is an extremely important step in the model. Effective extension activities will allow students to use the context of the entire lesson as a framework for creating original language (either written or oral) to complete a given task. It allows them to use creativity and originality to produce language that represents their own thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Allowing the students to creatively self-express themselves is an important part of their language learning process.
Now that you have explored all four steps of the model, take a moment to examine the figure below. It is a visual representation of the four steps of the model along with short descriptions of each step. Then, you can take a look at a real sample lesson of the model!
Source: Donato & Adair-Hauck (2002).
Now that you have a better idea of how the PACE Model works, click here to see how all four steps work in a real sample lesson!
Or click here to go back and revisit each step of the model.