How’s Your Reception? (Classroom activity, 25-35 minutes)
Highly adaptable to any level and/or material, How’s Your Reception is my personal creation.
Students need to use their cell phones for this activity so tell them a class ahead of time to bring their cell phones. This idea alone will get middle school students stirring in the seats.
Optional warm-up:
Tell students to find the language options of their cell phones and change them into English. Once they do this choose students to tell you what options they find on the menu page of their phones. You’ll get things like, “settings, sounds, phonebook, contacts, messages, etc.” Write these on the board. The students will likely know the English meaning because they will recognize the symbol on their cell phone.
Activity:
Put students in teams of 4. Each team designates 2 “outside” people and 2 “inside” people. The two outside people of each team will go outside the classroom (it’s best if you can put each team’s outside people in separate rooms or on separate floors – as far apart as possible). The outside people will be given an envelope. Inside the envelope will be a document containing a text or conversation. The inside people will stay in the classroom (put teams as far away from each other as possible). The inside teams will be given a set of questions. The answers to the questions can be found within the text document given to their teammates who are now outside the classroom. When you say the word, the inside people will call their outside teammates using their cell phones. They will read the questions and the outside people will search for the answers in the document they were given. The first team to complete all questions correctly wins.
Make sure students have their teammates’ cell numbers before they leave the classroom. You’ll have to stay attentive and watch as students record answers. Tell them when they’ve written a wrong answer so the outside team doesn’t come running back into the room claiming victory.
You’re likely to hear a lot of Chinese mixed in with English but you won’t believe how many times you hear the same sentences repeated over and over. The activity is a lot of fun and if you have some key sentences you want students to remember it works wonders.