Structured Input Part 2: Creating SI Activities

In Part 1 of this series I summarized the principles of Input Processing and shared examples of features that impede learners' need to process language.

In this post I want to share some Structured Input activities, and some tips for making your own.

First, there are two types of Structured Input activities: Referential, and Affective.

Referentialactivities refer to input that students have heard or read and have correct and incorrect answers. Affective activities are more personal, and there are no write or wrong answers, just different answers for different people.

For example: currently in Spanish 4 we are using a unit on Chocolate from Carrie Toth's Huellas curriculum and I am trying to get students to pay attention to and process past tense.

This is a referential activity because it refers to something that we discussed in class. There are indeed correct and incorrect answers here. Students need to know whether something happened typically throughout the history of chocolate (pay attention to/process/hopefully make form-meaning connection of imperfect), or if it was something that a chocolatier did to change how we consume chocolate (pay attention to/process/hopefully make form-meaning connection of preterite)

Here is an affective activity that focuses on imperfect subjunctive while maintaining focus on meaning:

This activity could lead to a really great discussion in class which would then reinforce the structures.

I hope to come up with more examples of my own, but if you want more examples take a look at Common Ground by Henshaw and Hawkins.

The book also talks about some pitfalls that people make when they attempt to create structured input activities (of which I've probably committed some in these examples even). Here is what they suggest:

1. Focus on one form at a time Notice that I only used 3rd person singular for the part of input that I wanted students to process. There are benefits to this: it doesn't overload learners on what they need to process, and it doesn't give away the answer simply from the form.

2. Keep meaning in focus These activities aren't just some type of spit shined grammar drills, rather they are ways to consolidate, expand, or review content of a class, or learn something about the world around us. I'm not simply asking the timeframe of when something happened in the first activity, students have to understand more than just grammar. Rather than "select preferite or imperfect" in my first activity, which would only require that students look at verb endings and nothing else, they had to think about the content we learned, and read the whole statement.

3. Make input bimodal This one is simple, students need to listen to and read in the language .

4. Make sure students do something with the input Don't just set it and forget it, give students a follow up with the activity. Have them interview their peers so they can find out WHICH chocolate ingredient most people would like, find out if there are chocolates that people have tried that have the flavors they discussed.

5. Make sure to go from sentence level to longer discourse We don't want to ONLY present students with simple sentences, we need to make sure students hear longer discourse so they can produce longer discourse. Remember, these activities are a tool, not a whole method.

6. Keep learners processing strategies in mind This is where all those principles from part 1 come into play! Review those, and complete the activity as if you were a learner. Is there anything that would give away the answers to referential activities? If so, how can you change it so students HAVE to focus on form?

7. Keep utterance length in mind This goes back to another principle! Certain parts of sentences are easier and harder to process, the longer the sentence the harder it is to focus on everything, furthermore you may be giving students too much to process and may overload attentional resources.

8. Don't worry about how you format your activities (as long as we're putting what we want processed at the front so it's more saliente). In my first example the options are to the right of the activity even though they would typically be read before each sentence, you can always follow up to make sure students hear utterances in the correct order.

9. Make sure utterances are grammatically possible In Spanish we have gender noun agreement. In a structured input activity, say a multiple choice activity, I wouldn't want to say "el escuela" because that would never be grammatically correct. Everything students read should be, to the best of your ability, grammatically possible.

10. Make sure to not giveaway the answer. In my first activity it would be a giveaway (typically) if I, say, put a year on the options. It would be very clear if I said sugar was added to chocolate in the 1800's.

Hopefully these tips are helpful if you're interested in continuing to look into structured input. My next post (in a couple weeks) will be about how I'm trying to implement these principles and ideas into my classroom. Until then!