Gamification in the MFL classroom: My favourite games at each learning stage

 We are finally on holidays and as we unwind after a hectic academic year, in this heatwave, I would like to share my favourite games in the classroom. I believe in gamification as it is a quick way to motivate students at all different stages of learning. My experience is that adding a game/competition element to any activity works wonders with ALL learners.  

The key is to carefully plan gamification and not to fall into the fallacy of carrying out games just in order to have fun, but to think of gamification as a methodical and planned strategy at all stages of the learning journey to increase motivation and, therefore, to support learning. 

These are some of my favourite games at each stage of the learning journey, following a lexicogrammar approach to teach MFL. 

Modelling games

Dictation with mistakes

Dictation is key in my teaching/learning routine and this is a classic! I dictate a text, based on a given sentence builder, interleaving material from past ones, with deliberate grammatical or phonetic mistakes. Students carry out the dictation and then, in pairs, highlight where the mistakes were and correct them.  They get a point for each spotted mistake and two extra points if they correct them correctly. I keep a tally on the board with the points of all teams. I give thinking time after the dictation for students to discuss with their partners the text.

Read, stop and finish the sentence

For this easy game, students work against a partner. I read a sentence, stop mid way and students finish the sentence with something that makes sense, in their mini whiteboards (MWBs)!  This is great for collocations.  The fastest student in the pair to do so, gets a point. To make it more fun, I also finish the sentence on my own MWB. If their finished bit coincides with mine, El Gordo, they get two extra points!  The person in the pair who ends up with more points wins. 

Random Dictation

I dictate random sentences, from our current Sentence Builder and past ones (interleaving). After students write down the sentences in MWBs, in pairs, they must put the sentences in a paragraph that makes sense. I do this under time conditions. The pair or pairs who finish the earliest are the winners. I love this activity because it allows me to provide good models of potential pieces of writing and at a second stage, students translate their paragraphs, analyse the text and even better, improve it! 

Fireball

I took this idea from Simona Gravina. It is a great way to gamify cold calling in the classroom. The idea is to have a soft toy or ball which is on fire! I pass it to a student, who I choose, so no way to get out of it, and students just need to repeat the sentence/ chunk I say, translate a sentence into TL or English, or answer a question from a given topic (great for GCSE oral practice). This is a great activity for retrieval practice as a starter/ plenary activity. Students get a point when hit by the fireball, so they want to be asked and hit! Students can pass the ball to me or to another student, which will allow them to be teachers!  I tend to allow students to pass the ball to another student so they practise asking questions. 

Structured Practice Games

Jenga

I love this game! In our department, we have lots of Jengas (they are cheap on Amazon and a great investment) and a giant one to play outside with a whole class divided in two teams. In the classroom, students play in pairs with their own set. They are given a series of sentences in English. Before having a go at the Jenga tower, they need to translate one of these sentences, which recycle the Sentence Builder we are working on.

I personally play this game with a wheel of names which students have in their laptops. They love it!  Instead of sentences, you can have vocabulary for students to put in a sentence or a verb they must conjugate in a given tense and then put in a sentence. It can be adapted to anything!

Connect 4

I play this exactly in the same way as Jenga but with a digital version from Genially, which students display on a computer between pairs. We also have a giant physical Connect 4 game which we carry out outside when the weather allows it! If you are not keen on Genially, you can also use a PowerPoint template game. 

For a wide range of PPT game templates, use this link.

Or this one for 10 more templates.

Wheel of names/Spinner Wheel

You all know how much I love Wheel of names  or Spinner Wheel (same as Wheel of names but you are allowed up to 8 wheels in one screen). I use them as a whole class task, giving individual points when sentences are translated or verbs conjugated, but also, my students use them in pairs, using OneNote, as I share the link with them and play Piedra, papel, tijera (Stone, paper and scissors) each time they spin the wheel. 

Example of Spinner Wheel here

I love the wheels because they can be updated to GCSE questions, grammatical items, vocabulary etc.. 

Battleships

I have to include this game as it works for me each time I use it!  I use Battleships in the Modelling stage too, as a listening activity, have a look at this past blogpost here, but mainly at this stage of learning. Students play in pairs. I create a Battleships worksheet, see below. Students choose 7/8 boxes and tick them at random. The aim of the game is to try to find out where the ticks (ships) of their partner are,  by creating sentences according to certain coordinates. I love this game, because it can be used at any level with simple or more complex language. The beauty of it is that it can lead to a homework task, where students are asked to write down 20 sentences from their battleships before embarking on their own creative writing. 

Fluency Games

Any of the games from the Structured Practice stage, can be used at this stage but giving a time constriction, 30 seconds, 20 seconds etc.. to promote Fluency. Having said that, these are my favourite games at this stage.

Dice Games

Super simple! Students work in pairs and I display numbered questions on the board: 6 if using a dice, from 2 to 12 if using two dice or from 3 to 18 if using 3 dice. Students roll the dice and answer the question linked to that specific number, under 20 seconds, which their partner times. I combine this with a Jenga game or Connect 4 game.

Spider Game

This is a great game for the last stage of learning! I get a cheap wool ball, which I throw at a pupil while I place a question. The student answers the question, under time constriction, holds a piece of string from the wool and throws the ball at some else while posing a new question. The second student, gets hold of the wool thread and throws the ball at someone else, while keeping hold of the thread, and so on. We practise this game outside, if possible, while everyone sits down in a circle. The result? a Spiderweb formed with the wool string that each student holds! 

Speed Dating

Another favourite! For this game I take everyone outside the classroom, in the corridor and divide the class into two rows, facing each other. I clap my hands and students, facing each other, must ask each other a set of questions, which we have extensively practised inside the classroom. I gave them 1 minute to ask each other and I clap again. Students on the right stay where they are but students on the left, move a space facing a new person. This is a fun, simple way to practise questions and answers. 

Piñata Game

This is a another Genially game, which I adapted from Marie Allirot. We play it as a whole class which is divided in two teams. Someone from each team, which I nominate (cold calling) must answer a question spontaneously. I also allow students in their team to improve the answer! 

That student chooses a number from the board, which will reveal points for their team, negative points, a robber taking all points or the arrows showing an exchange of points between teams. I keep a tally on the board. Students absolutely love it!!!! I can adapt it to any questions and levels and it requires zero preparation. 

Finally, sites such as The Language Gym, LearningApps, WordWall, Blooket, Quizziz, DeckToys, Textivate or Sentence Builders are great game tools, especially as these sites allow you to  generate your own tasks based on your own vocabulary and structures. 

Embedded grammar: The Eureka Effect!

As you probably know, I have been working with the talented Dr Gianfranco Conti and Dylan Viñales on a new Spanish Grammar book aimed at foundation level, underpinned by EPI methodology and a lexicogrammar approach to teaching MFL. The book is called  Spanish Verb Pivots, title which reflects the core of the EPI methodology and which, Gianfranco has explained really well in social media and in the book itself. 

I thoroughly enjoyed co-writing this book with such gifted practitioners but what I enjoyed the most was the opportunity to implement in a systematic way, how I have been approaching grammar in my lessons for years. 

I don’t teach grammar in isolation, I did at some point, and I quickly realised it was useless, as practising a set of rules over and over again could lead to excellent choral conjugation of verb paradigms but made no difference in reaching  fluency, hence leading to frustration! 

Instead, I soon realised that grammar should be taught embedded in the lexicon we teach via chunks. For that I use my own sentence builders. We practise those chunks constantly during lessons, we analyse patterns, I plant the seed, quoting Dr Conti, on grammar to come, students become fluent on a particular topic, and then, only then, I teach grammar explicitly. At that point grammar becomes a dejá vu feeling and most likely to be automatised. 

Grammar is embedded in the language, so let’s deconstruct it, yes, but only once students have internalised target structures/vocab, so that they can develop creativity. 

An example: The past tense in Y8

This is how I teach the topic of holidays in the past in Y8, always after having learned to talk about holidays in the present, which will lead to the learning of the Past tense in Spanish.

Modelling stage

At this stage I introduce the following Sentence Builder via choral repetition and showing the Spanish written graphemes and the English, so there's no confusion whatsoever on what structures mean! Thinking about the new GCSE, this Sentence Builder, already incorporates High Frequency words: such as the verbs intentar and encontrar. The Sentence Builder aims for students to learnn the I form of the past tense, including irregular verbs and be fluent with them.

We carry out lots of modelling activities as outlined in this blogpost here. At this stage I work mainly with MWBs to check for understanding. I also allow students to have their Sentence Builders with them: scaffolding. Lots of input activities take place throughout the Modelling stage, which will last a couple of lessons. 

By the way, I only teach, depending on ability, a row at a time in the Sentence Builder above. For example, I would not teach opinions and reasons, at the same time as all those verbs in the Past Tense to avoid cognitive overload.  

Similarly, when doing listening/translations/dictations, I always make sure I interleave past structures and vocabulary: embedded retrieval practice! This stage finishes with the explicit learning of the chunks for a spelling test. Quizlet, Memrise and even better, the Sentence Builder site are great tools to assist students in this learning, which I do as homework tasks.

Structured Practice Stage

Following the MARS EARS approach to lexicogrammar teaching, after 2 modelling lessons per row, I would expect students to start producing some sentences with guidance. I always do this as a whole class to start with with MWBs and orally. 

Digital tools are great at this stage, such as Flippity, Wheel of names, or Sentence Builsders site, as well as some old classics, like any Battleships, Oral Ping-Pong, pyramid translations, board games or just any information gap activity! Have a look at this blogpost for ideas. 

At this stage, we can start looking at grammatical patterns in the sentence builders! Homework tasks may include more extensive reading, as well as guided written practice: tangled translations for example. In this blogpost I give some ideas on how to revamp and maximise the digital activities we use in lessons as homework tasks, saving lots of time. 

Fluency stage

The hardest stage! Which, paradoxically, seems to be ignored. This will take three/four lessons and it is similar to the previous stage but I expect students to come up with their own answers to specific questions under time constrictions! 

Speed dating, stealing sentences with initials, board games with questions or the beginning of a sentence, flippity with a question and a expression to be used in the answer are some of my favourite activities here! A summary of the activities at each stage can be seen below:

Somewhere in the fluency stage I teach grammar! 

Inductive grammar: The Eureka Effect!

As students have had so much practice with the structures I want them to learn, I expect my pupils to work out the rule of the past tense for all persons from a text that we analyse. Remember, they already know the present and the I form of the past tense extremely well! This is the Eureka effect of this approach!

Students work in pairs to come up with a rule, we check it, we agree on it and then I explain it, explicitly, again. They take notes and then, as if it was a sentence builder, I follow the same process of modelling, structured practice, fluency tasks, again but referring to Grammar. 

Modelling Grammar

This involves carrying out the same tasks done at the Modelling Stage, when learning our sentence builder,  but now using the we, he/she, you, they persons of the past tense: dictations, reading activities, listening tasks, translations. At this stage a homework task will involve to learn the six verb endings for -ar and -er/-ir verbs in Spanish and a test, which just will inform me if students understood this grammar point but which is not a reflection of student success in Spanish! 

Practising Grammar

Again, we carry out the same tasks as in the structured practice stage, but now focussing on the grammar point we are studying: the past tense. 

This is where learning grammar can be great as there are lots of games I can incorporate at this point! Basically, any game like connect four, snakes and ladders, stone/paper/scissors, Jenga, four in a box, you name it, works here! My students love grammar because it is fun and they experimented a Eureka feeling, which leads to motivation and "a can do" attitude. Remember, we don’t just conjugate verbs but we embed the past tense into communicative utterances! More traditional worksheets work very well here too, with an element of competition! 

Being fluent with Grammar

This is the Holy Grail of MFL! If students  are fluent in grammar, by default if taught via a lexicogrammar methodology, students should be fluent in the target language! Easier said that done! 

This will involve a few lessons and lots of interleaving over the years! But at this stage, I expect students to be able to narrate, in a simple way and quickly, what they and other members of their family did during the holidays! All the fun activities from the previous stage work, but with a time limit. 

This stage must be reinforced by carefully planned homework tasks that will allow students to be creative, while still having time to think about grammatical rules: Creative Writing tasks are ideal at this stage. 

So, grammar is clearly embedded in the learning process and it leads itself to have a Eureka effect. 

It can be explicitly taught but not at the beginning of the learning journey but towards the end and not as end on its own, but as a tool to be able to communicate fluently in the target language. 

Similarly, any grammar point will neeed to be revised many times and in different contexts to be fully assimilated: free time by saying what students did yesterday or what happened in a film; school by saying what students studied yesterday etc… 

I would like openly to thank Dr Gianfranco Conti and Dylan Viñales for the opportunity to allow me to work and learn from them during the creation of Spanish Verb Pivots. It’s been such a pleasure.  

Coco: A sequence of lessons, anchoring in challenge!

In this blogpost I am focussing on project based learning and how we spent 6 weeks in Y9 studying the film Coco. We did this right after the Easter Holidays leading up to the May half-Term. Previously, we had studied the topic of TV learning to describe different types of TV programmes, comparing them, saying why students like/ liked some and not others. The idea was to link such vocabulary to a real film, while learning about South-American culture, Mexico and the Day of the dead. Students have two lessons per week in Y9 and this sequence of lessons was intended for a top set but it was slightly updated for all abilities. 

We started by watching the film Coco in Spanish with English subtitles. For that, we payed for the film in Youtube. 

We created two sentence builders. Sentence Builder 1 is what we called Levels 1 and 2 and focusses on what is the film about and how to describe the plot. 

Sentence Builder 2, was a short one and we called it Level 10 and focussed on giving an opinion about the film.  ( Levels 3-9 were not covered in the 6 weeks of teaching, due to lack of time, but it included descriptions of clothes and relationships among members of the film).

We also created a Memrise course to go with the unit for students to learn the chunks that we were covering in lessons.  For Memrise Course, click here. 

The sequence of lessons can be found in this Genially below:

 

The film and all the activities presented in this Genially were carried out within 12 lessons and involved tasks following the EPI/Lexicogrammar approach by Dr Gianfranco Conti, with my own variations and use of digital tasks. 

The sequence starts with modelling activities when a Sentence Builder is introduced, including repetition, dictation, delayed dictation, finishing the sentence after me etc.. with the use of MWBs and lots of praise and merits for every 3 correct answers (my students always keep a tally in their MWBs and at the end they collect their merits). This motivates all students as they want to do well to get their merits at the end of the lesson.

The planned sequence, involves students learning the vocabulary, little by little, using the Memrise courses, in a Flipped Classroom scenario, so when the Sentence Builder was introduced for the first time, students were very familiar with the vocabulary. Spanish being a phonetic language is great for this!

For many lessons, after modelling, we practised the vocabulary in many different ways, until students mastered the Sentence Builders, and believe me they did!!! We carried out, translations via LearningApps, Textivate, Oral Ping-Pong, Battleships and more traditional translations where students were working in Pairs and competing with each other!

I recycled the Wheel of Names activities as starter/plenaries and whole class oral/written activities as needed! By the end of the 12 week period, students could carry out the final writing task from memory and talk for around 2 minutes on Coco. 

The sequence also includes a cute listening activity which I created with Snapchat, inspired by Naziha de Londres. I love this type of video, listening activities because I can vary my vocabulary, speed etc and personalise the learning experience!

Finally, students learned about Day of the Dead in Mexico and carried out a Poster using Spanish and English where they wrote about Coco but also what they had learned about the Day of the Dead.

Why I love it!

The sentence builders are, deliberately, quite complex as they allow me to introduce Direct Object pronouns easily: "su tatarabuelo los abandonó" or "su familia lo obliga a ser zapatero". We dedicated a lesson towards the end analysing these Object Pronouns and comparing the two sentences above with "merece la pena verla"  Why lo/los/la? why in the case of "verla" the pronoun appears after the verb? What is the rule? This grammatical point will be reinforced after half term when we introduce our last topic: food and we learn "lo comí" etc.. Similarly, we revised the past tense, which students had already learned, and I introduced the future "si promete que no será músico".  

Furthermore, students learned about Mexican culture, watched a real film with a purpose and learned sophisticated vocabulary at GCSE level! They loved that as they felt "clever": anchoring in challenge! The sequence also allowed students manipulate the language and conjugate verbs in different tenses while giving their real opinion on something relatable to them!

Embedded Phonics: nothing revolutionary, it is what learning languages is about!

I have wanted to write a post about Phonics for a long time, especially after the announcement that a new GCSE was going to be launched, focussing on the NCELP three Pillars of Grammar, Vocabulary and Phonics. It struck me that the new GCSE was implying that, currently, we did not teach enough, if at all, Phonics in the MFL classroom. 

Well, if we teach languages and we teach listening/speaking, irremediably, we are teaching Phonics!

The way I teach Phonics is through an embedded approach, rather than a Synthetic one, which seems to be the case for NCELP.

What is Phonics?

Phonics is actually a teaching method (as apposed to Phonetics which is the science of studying speech sounds) which consists in learning how the different graphemes in a given language correspond to specific sounds, which we call phonemes when referring to linguistics or a language in abstract.

Having this knowledge is key for any language learner as it is the foundation of pronunciation, hence communication in the target language and, equally important, it allows learners to understand the spoken language, by making a correlation between the sounds they hear to specific graphemes, and ultimately meaning.

Phonics and lexicogrammar

As you know, I follow a lexicogrammar approach to teaching languages, which works wonders for all different ability levels, inspired by Dr Gianfranco Conti. I have heard criticism to the Lexicogrammar / EPI approach implying that it does not teach Phonics, neither Grammar nor individual Words. I can assure it does! 

I teach Phonics embedded in all the stages of the learning journey. When preparing our Sentence Builders, my team and I always make sure that we include a wide range of words containing key sounds in Spanish, and at some point, as we do with grammar, this is explicitly pointed out. However, we don’t teach such words//sounds in isolation as a synthetic approach would do.

This way, our students will have being exposed and extensively practised, all the sounds specific to the Spanish language and its correspondent grapheme within a year starting in Y7. Yes, I teach Spanish, so doing this is so much easier in this language than in French, as Spanish, as German, is a phonetic language.  

For example, in Y7, students learn phonics from their first lessons, when they learn how to say their name and how they are feeling in Spanish. Our Sentence Builders will include names such as:

Alejandro, to teach the sound/phoneme /x/ which corresponds to the grapheme  j 

Hector, to teach that the grapheme h in Spanish is mute and does not correspond to any phoneme, we just don't pronounce it!

Ramón, to teach the phoneme /r/ and later on, in the topic of Free Time, correr, to explain how the phoneme /r/ corresponds to the grapheme r at the beginning of a letter or rr between vowels.

Me llamo, to teach the phoneme /ʎ/ or Tengo sueño, when teaching ¿Cómo estás? to teach the phoneme /ɲ/ . 

How do I teach Phonics?

Embedded in all the stages of the learning language, through lots, lots of modelling activities and structured practice tasks, as part of the memorisation and, ultimately, automatization of the language, to achieve fluent communication. 

Below you can find a selection of some of my favourite activities that I use at each stage of the learning process, many inspired by Dr Gianfranco Conti’s and Steve Smith’s book Breaking the Sound barrier. There are more but this is just a selection.  

Some of my favourite activities at the Modelling stage:

Repetition in different ways/voices to model pronunciation: chanting, singing, angry. 

Dictations, normal dictations, gapped dictations, delayed dictation (same as a normal dictation but students have to wait around 10 seconds before they are allowed to write the words/ sentences they hear). I do this, initially, with short chunks to, increasingly, using longer sentences and chunks combinations.

I start a word and students finish it

Descriminatory games where I say two words with a distinctive phoneme and students need to decide which represents a specific cleaning: hago patinaje versus hice patinaje or haré patinaje. Which one refers to the past? This is important, as phonemes are the smallest linguistic unit which has an impact on meaning.

Bad listening, where I give students a text, I read it with subtle differences and students need to sport such differences.

Battleship listening, where I give students  battleships grid, filled with small sentences, I say about 10 of the and  students write the coordinate of my sentences.

Pyramid listening , where I small chunk which progressively gets longer as we advance in the pyramid and students need to transcribe what they hear.

Faulty echo, where I say words with the wrong pronunciation and students must identify where the mistake lays.

Basically, I expose my students to lots of listening activities in the Modelling stage, so that they become familiar with different phonemes or sounds, making a direct correlation, via the sentence builder, to their correspondent graphemes and therefore to meaning. 

For an exhaustive list of listening activities, visit this blogpost. To do this successfully, it is important to personalise these listening tasks and not just carry out listening activities via a given textbook audio to test meaning only,  but to use listening tasks, via my voice, live, as a learning tool, to focus on the correlation of graphemes and sounds/phonemes. 

Before using commercialised listening tasks, I also create my own listening material, which allows me to continue personalising my listening activities, when using longer audio passages to focus on meaning. For this, I use, any online recording app, like Mote, Vocaroo or I use speaking Bitmojis, and Snapchat videos! 

Below, you can find a short video, under a minute, for my Y9 students on the topic of Coco.T The video will be the basis of a listening task: fill in the gaps, questions, summarising, translating etc..

In other words, Phonics is strongly linked to listening and it is tackled when we carry out listening tasks heavily based on vocabulary from our Sentence Builder.

After modelling, for at least a lesson, sometimes two lessons, at the Structured Practice stage, I plan lots of reading aloud activities. The idea here, is for students to practice the sounds that they have extensively listened to and have already made correspondence to graphemes and meaning, in the previous learning stage. 

Some of my favourite activities at the Structured Practice stage:

Stealing Sentences

Reading Battleships (same as listening battleships but students read the sentences now and play the game in pairs, where they need to find out the coordinates of their partner’s.

Oral Ping-Pong

Pyramid translations 

....and any choral reading aloud activity, performed as a class or in pairs using Wheel of names, or Flippity, which will allow students to practise the pronunciation of words, hence, doing Phonics. 

There's no need to say that phonics or saying words in good/correct pronunciation, will continue in the Spontaneous and Routinisation learning stages. 

Do I teach  Phonics explicitly and in isolation?

Explicitly yes! At some point in the learning journey, sometimes as early as at the Modelling stage, I will point out, explicitly, the correspondence of sound/phoneme and grapheme. Sometimes later. This is super useful when new words, with the same sound, appear later in the course and I ask students to predict how to pronounce them based on their knowledge of  phonics and the corresponde of phoneme/grapheme.

In isolation, no! My experience is that students forget words when taught out of context. My experience is that learning Vocabulary(Meaning)-Grammar-Phonics all at once (Lexicogrammar), via our Sentence Builders, reduces cognitive overload and facilitates the transfer of structures/vocabulary to the long term memory.

To sum up, I teach Phonics as I teach Spanish and I teach how to pronounce words and students consistently learn how to link sounds to graphemes. So, nothing new from the new GCSE, neither worried about a Dictation task as part of the new GCSE assessment, although I will argue the communicative value of such exercise in an exam! I teach Phonics because I teach Spanish via a Lexicogrammar Approach.

Developing ideas at A Level via authentic resources: a model lesson

I haven't written much in a while, due to revision sessions, oral exams etc.. but the Year 11s have now gone and tomorrow will be the last lesson with my Year 13s! So, I thought I would post something on A Level, specifically for Y12. This is a model lesson which exemplifies how I use authentic resources to give ideas on a given topic to my students, which they can adopt to discuss a point of view and make clear reference to Spanish society. In this particular case, the lesson follows the Edexcel Syllabus and concentrates on the impact of Tourism on the environment. 

Students had already done some work on Tourism and the impact it can have on the environment. This lesson meant to consolidate those general ideas and blend them with a real case scenario: Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

The first activity was a metacognition and retrieval practice opportunity for students to self-reflect, on vocabulary and ideas that they could remember, without access to notes, from previous lessons. I wanted students to work individually for this activity and self-assess themselves!

Secondly, I explained that we were going to look at a case study, Benidorm, and showed the following super short, Tik-Tok video. We watched it three times and students just described what they could see and the contrast of the images:

For this, I expected students to use the vocabulary they had recalled in their metacognition exercise. This video is, in essence, a post GCSE photocard task, which all students should be able to react to and improvise some ideas on. Look at this post on how I exploit Tik-Tok videos, instead of photocards with Year 11s. 

The purpose of the lesson was to instil ideas into the students, to do that, I decided to use an adaptation of the following authentic blogpost, through listening. I made a short summary of the blogpost and identified unknown, interesting and idiomatic vocabulary in the text: click here for my summary.

I created a Tarsia activity with such vocabulary and students matched the Spanish to the English.

The lesson followed with a listening activity where the new vocabulary would be key! I did this as a Dictogloss activity: I read my adaptation/summary of the blogpost to the students, twice. They took notes in English and/or Spanish, then, in pairs they reconstructed the text in writing.

Why Dictogloss? 

By doing this activity, students practised the skill of sumarising a text from an audio source, part of the A Level Paper 1 exam. 

Similarly, they were listening to two very good points of view about Benidorm as a tourist resort: a negative point of view, accusing the city of destroying the Spanish coast and a positive point of view, which defends Benidorm as a model of sustainable tourism, thanks to its skyscrapers, which concentrates lots of tourists in a small space. 

Students had to listen to these contradictory points of view steal and use them in future lessons to exemplify their own views on the topic.  Similarly, Dictogloss, allows me to personalise an ordinary listening activity, as I could act the text while reading it! By reading the text to students, I could pause, go slowly or faster, as needed,  and use gesture together with eye contact to put the text ideas across! 

Finally, students reconstructed the text into Spanish. After 20 minutes, students were given the transcript so they could compare their written versions to the real text. To finish the lesson, we all summarised the positive and negative points about Benidorm as a tourist resort. 

Follow up

Students were given a direct link to the original post, much longer and complex than my summarised version, and a 5 minute authentic video from La Sexta talking about Benidorm. For homework, students had to read the authentic text, watch the 5 minute video, take notes and write a 250 essay on Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

In subsequent lessons, students can create presentations and, ultimately, they can debate on the topic.