Home sweet home!

Short description

In this activity, students will be provided with an opportunity to practice the names of rooms in a house and prepositions of place. This session will be carried out using a VR application, called Immerse. Therefore, each student is instructed on how to use a VR headset beforehand.

Contextualization

Target Age: 12

Target Language Level (based on CEFR): A2

Location: Immerse VR Home

Target Structures

Vocabulary Items

• • Rooms: Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom

  • Furniture: 

    • Living room → Sofa, TV, coffee table, carpet, bookshelf, TV stand, clock, record player, VR headset, record, lamp; 

    • Kitchen → Oven, stove, fridge, trash can, cutting board, knife, fork, plate, spoon, teapot, coffee maker; 

    • Bathroom → Bathtub, shower, toilet, towel, mirror, sink, toilet paper, toothbrush, toothpaste; 

    • Bedroom → Bed, dresser, closet, bedside table, fan, desk, whiteboard, computer, armchair

Grammatical Structures

• • Prepositions of place: in, on, under, next to, behind, in front of

CEFR Competencies

Reception: 

Oral Comprehension

• Can follow a very simple, well-structured presentation or demonstration, provided it is illustrated with slides, concrete examples or diagrams, it is delivered slowly and clearly with repetition, and the topic is familiar. 

Production: 

Oral Production

• Can describe everyday aspects of their environment, e.g. people, places, a job or study experience. 

• Can give short, basic descriptions of events and activities. 

• Can use simple descriptive language to make brief statements about and compare objects and possessions.

Interaction: 

Oral Interaction

• Can deal with practical everyday demands: finding out and passing on straightforward factual information.

• Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information.

Mediation: 

• Can collaborate in simple, shared tasks, provided other participants articulate slowly and one or more people help them contribute and express their suggestions.

Communicative Language Competences:

Linguistic Competence

• Has sufficient vocabulary to conduct routine everyday transactions involving familiar situations and topics.

• Uses some simple structures correctly, but still systematically makes basic mistakes; nevertheless, it is usually clear what they are trying to say.

Sociolinguistic Competence

• Can socialize simply but effectively using the simplest common expressions and following basic routines.

Pragmatic Competence

• Can use simple techniques to start, maintain, or close a short conversation.

Learning Objectives (SWBATs)

• Students will be able to identify rooms in a house.

• Students will be able to match furniture items to the rooms where they are typically found.

• Students will be able to talk about the locations of appliances and utensils in a house by using prepositions of place.

Preparation

• Students will be reminded how to use a VR headset in Immerse.

• The teacher will make sure that every headset and controller is fully charged before the session by encouraging students to double check it.

• The access code for the classroom will be shared beforehand.

Materials

• App: Immerse 

• Handouts: Lesson plan for HomeSweetHomeUIUC

• Equipment: VR Headsets, Computers

Brief description of each phase of the task cycle 

Pre-task (6 min)

Students first work on a short grammar revision activity as a whole class and place objects as instructed on the prompt cards. Students then categorize furniture vocabulary items according to the room. The teacher will use the whiteboard in the living room for this activity.

Main task (10 min)

Next, students are divided into small groups; each group is assigned one room. They are given a set of prompts with objects and furniture items (e.g. "Grab the book and put it on the bed"). Students have to manipulate and move objects in the room to match the rearranged room to the description in the prompts. Then students swap rooms and check how well their peers reorganized the objects according to the prompt cards. They write 5 sentences about the objects in the prompt card (e.g. "The guitar is not next to the TV. It is next to the shelf").

Post-task (4 min)

Students meet in the living room and report what they did and how effectively their peers completed the task. This allows for a collaborative negotiation of meaning through self-reflection and peer reflection.