warm-ups

Interaction

Warm-up Ideas

The activities planned for the first few minutes of class should be designed to build community, reduce student anxiety, and provide scaffolding for more complex L2 use later on in the class.

Students entering a communication-based L2 classroom must navigate the transition between two linguistic and cultural worlds. They must move from an environment with which they’re familiar into one where the object of study — the L2 — is simultaneously the medium of communication. The first few minutes of the class are a critical opportunity to ease students through this transition, drawing them in with meaning-based conversation, reminding them implicitly of useful vocabulary and syntax structures, and establishing a positive immersive environment.

In a 50-minute class session, there may be relatively little time for this, but long or short, the warm-up period is an important space for enhancing students’ motivation and success in the course.



A few ideas for warm-up activities in a remote L2 environment:

Vocabulary warm-up ideas:

  • Have students brainstorm all the words they associate with another word or topic.
  • Give students a short list of new words (or words for review) and send them to Breakout Rooms to chat conversationally with each other — but with instructions to working all of the words on the list, or as many as possible, into their conversation.
  • Novice level: Create a word chain by saying a word, asking someone to say a word beginning with the last letter of your word, and continue the pattern with either oral responses or written responses in the Chat field.
  • Novice level: Ask for words of one syllable; then two syllables; then three syllables ... and have students respond orally or in writing in the Chat field.

Depending on proficiency levels, warm-up activities can approximate authentic conversation, or they can be structured to take the form of games; they may lead into more extended activities, and in fact may seem identical to standard classroom L2 tasks. But they should be perceived as warm-ups, i.e., something short and easy to start off with, related to the current topic perhaps, but separate from the “real” classroom work to follow in that the tone should be light and casual, with minimal corrective feedback.


NB: Be sensitive to topics and comments that may be unwelcome, or perceived as evaluative, or simply too repetitive; and avoid topics that may be interesting to a few students but clearly not to all.