Activity

Intercultural Activity

(For a PDF version of this activity description, click here.)

Overview

The activity outlined in this section was created for students in the second or third semester of Spanish at the undergraduate university level. These students are typically expected to be around Intermediate Low on the ACTFL proficiency scale.

In this activity, students describe different people that they consider famous and express the accomplishments of these individuals. Then, students research a famous Hispanic figure in order to create a mini-biography of the person. Students will create connections by comparing these figures to others that are familiar to the students.

Objectives

Students will use the past tense (preterit and imperfect) to describe several famous people and their accomplishments.
Students will write a mini-biography about a Hispanic figure in order to create a mini encyclopedia of famous Hispanics on the course’s Blackboard site.
Students will find similarities between Hispanic figures and familiar famous people in order to relate other cultures with students’ world of knowledge and make inferences about the Hispanic figures’ fame.

Materials

Teachers should have access to the adjacent PowerPoint slides, a computer and projector, a copy of the handout (graphic organizer) for each student, and each student should have access to a device with internet access to research different Hispanic figures, and to complete the writing assignment which will be posted online.

This activity may take about 45 minutes; however, much of this depends on the aptitude and discipline of the class – the teacher may wish to assign the extension (writing) portion for homework.

CULTURE.pptx

Procedure

I. WARM UP (5 minutes total)

In order to get students to think about 1) famous people, and 2) past tense and past accomplishments, the teacher will discuss the information on Slide 2 and 3 of the PPT. Showing Slide 2, the teacher will ask students to think about what types of professions famous people have (“¿Qué profesiones tienen las personas más famosas de los Estados Unidos?”). Begin by asking yes/no questions to the professions listed in the PPT, then create a list on the board of additional professions.

Showing Slide 3, the teacher will ask students to consider important events that happened to them in the past (“¿Cuál es un momento importante de tu pasado?”). The teacher will give an example from their life and then cold call students to respond about their lives, writing what students say on the board.

II. GUIDED PRACTICE (3-5 minutes)

The teacher will refer students to the picture of Abraham Lincoln on Slide 4 and will ask students to contribute to answer the four questions: What is his name? What was his profession? When was he born? When did he die? What was he like? What were 2-3 important events in his life? The teacher will write what students say on the board in order to have a model for their independent practice.

III. INDEPENDENT PRACTICE (10 minutes)

Teacher will refer students to the graphic organizer on the handout and will instruct students to think of a famous person that interests them (“¿Qué persona famosa te interesa mucho?”). Then, the teacher will guide students to complete the information in the top row of the graphic organizer for each of the five columns with the information about their selected person. (Teachers may want to allow students to use their cell phones to look up information, as students may not know off the top of their head certain dates.) The teacher can circulate the room helping students as needed.

Once the teacher sees that most/all students are finished, they will break the class into groups of three. In groups, students will ask each other questions about each of the five columns in their graphic organizer in order to fill out the information in rows 2-3 about the famous people that their group members selected. Showing Slide 6, the teacher can model the questions that students can use to solicit information about the famous people. As students begin to talk and record information, the teacher can circulate the room helping students as needed.

IV. EXTENSION (15 minutes – or, perhaps given as at-home assignment)

Using the sign-up sheet on the handout, the teacher will assign each student a famous Hispanic figure to research and gather information for. Students will use internet resources to gather information for each column of the fourth row of their graphic organizer. The teacher should reinforce the fact that sentences should be made clear to be understood by their classmates. Do not use fancy language that they look up or that they found in a biography.

Then, the teacher will instruct students to log into the course’s Blackboard (or similar) site and under the discussion board section, write a mini-biography using the information gathered/brainstormed using the graphic organizer. The teacher may show the model on Slide 8 of the PPT to familiarize the students with the intended format of the mini-biography. Students will post the text to a discussion board along with a picture of the person.

IV. REFLECT (10 minutes – or, perhaps given as at-home assignment)

Teacher will guide students (or give as an assignment) to read 2 of the mini- biographies and respond to the posts, making comparisons to the famous Hispanics and their own personal world of knowledge. Students will respond with the following format:

“Esta persona me hace recordar a ___________ porque...”
This person reminds me of _____ because...”

Additionally, in their responses, students will complete the following thought:

“Esta persona parece única porque...”
This person seems unique because...

Rationale

This activity fits within ACTFL’s description of Presentational Communication in several ways. According to ACTFL’s Performance Descriptors (see actfl.org), presentational communication is the “Creation of messages to inform, explain, persuade, or narrate” (p. 7). The final product that students make here, the mini-biography, is a creation of written material that is meant to inform other students of who certain famous people are, and in a brief manner, narrate their lives. Through their responses to the biography posts, students explain how certain famous people relate to their realm of knowledge. While the discussion board may create the notion that this is ‘interpersonal’ communication, the biographies themselves represent a “one-way communication intended to facilitate interpretation” of certain information. The idea of a discussion board is not necessarily a “back-and-forth”; however, it allows students to reflect on several different people from the Spanish-language community. One downfall of this written product is that its audience is not necessarily authentic in that the audience members are not “members of the other culture where no direct opportunity for the active negotiation of meaning between members of the two cultures exist.” This could be adapted, however, through an online exchange with a Spanish-language community.

actfl.org

This activity is designed to develop intercultural competence on various levels. Without a doubt, students gain general knowledge of the Spanish-language and Hispanic communities through their research of different famous Hispanic figures, and to a certain extent, skills of discovery and interaction through the sharing of information on the online discussion boards (though, real-time communication may not very spontaneous). By asking students to respond to others’ biographies and contemplate similarities between those famous people with ones they’re more familiar with, teachers help develop students’ skills of interpreting and relating. By evaluating Hispanic figures’ accomplishments in order to express what is unique about them, students foster their critical cultural awareness, which may influence their intercultural attitudes.

*This activity was inspired by activity "National bards" from John Corbett's Intercultural Language Activities (p. 169-70).

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