TILT Innovations and Ideas

Femke Van Schie and Mira Silvander

Short description

In this activity, the children will work in pairs to describe a mystery word to TalkpalAI, one sentence at a time. The teacher has prepared a set of mystery words and each pair will be assigned two words to describe. First, the children will write their clues on paper and then they will either type (first word) or speak (second word) them to the AI. The goal of the activity is for TalkpalAI to correctly guess the mystery words based on the clues provided by the students.

Contextualization

Target age: 10 year old children
Target language level: A2
Location: indoors, classroom

Lesson aims

Production: Producing language yourself, either spoken or written.
Communicative Language Competences: Linguistic competence – the “building blocks” of language: vocabulary, grammar, spelling, pronunciation.

Learning objectives

Students will be able to:

describe a word using simple English sentences, while practicing basic grammar and vocabulary.
Use TalkPalAI to practice in English, in order to improve their pronunciation and listening comprehension through AI interaction.
Work collaboratively in pairs to communicate ideas effectively.

Preparation for the app task cycle (before the lesson)

Downloading app
Becoming familiar with the technology if needed
Getting an account (not needed but it saves chats)
Start a chat

Materials

Link: Link to TalkPalAI
Teacher equipment and preparation:
- 10-20 Mystery word (depending on the size of the class)
- Tablets/computer/iphone with the TalkPalAi ready (working sound, etc.)
- Example of sentences and words in front of the class: (“It is...”, “It has...”, “It’s used for...” or adjectives like “big/small”, “red” or “round”).
- Prepared working groups/pairs
Student equipment: paper, pen and eraser

Description of each phase of the task cycle

Pre-task:

As a teacher we would start by doing an example of a mystery word. We would hide it from the students and give them clues.
When the students guess it right, the teacher write down examples of sentence starters on the board and talk about different adjectives that can help the children.
Teacher assigns word to the pairs,
We ask the students to write down three sentences each to write to the AI, about their mystery word.
Lastly we give them a clear sentence that's the first sentence they send to talkpal ai. (Hi Talkpal ai! Do you wanna play a game? I have a mystery word and you need to find out what it is based on my clues.”
We also make clear that they need to write at least 3-5 sentences to the AI before the Ai can guess it

Main task:

The students take turns writing to the AI, using their sentences as support.
When the AI guesses correctly, choose a new word.
Then they do the same procedure, but instead of writing, they will now be speaking to the AI.
The goal is for them to do 2 words, if they finish fast they can do more words.

Post-task:

The pairs can share their favorite mystery word to the class by giving the clues they gave to the AI.
We could also have an exit ticket where students need to write something like:
“ My favorite mystery word was _______. The Ai could guess it because we gave this clue: ________”
We as teacher could also have a conversation about useful and important phrases to describe an object.

Examples of materials and app in use:

Sentence starters:

It is a thing / food / place.

You can see it at the ________.

You can use it for _____.

It looks like ________.

It’s big/small, or round or red etc.