ELT in Brazil

This lesson is a sequence to “My bedroom – TBL Lesson #2”. If you haven’t read that post I recommend you do to understand the context here!

For this lesson I wanted to try out a classic – Spot the differences. This kind of activity was considered, together with all Student A – Student B activities, as the golden standard for the early communicative approach by providing an information gap for students to cross (fill?) through communication.

These students and I have been talking about our homes, appliances, and furniture for three lessons now and I wanted to wrap up this unit of learning on bedrooms before it gets tiring for them (and myself).

For this lesson, I drew two similar versions of the same bedroom and sent each student one of the versions. You can see the drawings below:

I told students the bedrooms were similar but not equal and that they had to talk and find the differences. Students could use the editing tool on their phones to highlight the differences.

Students engaged with the task for about 10 minutes. They struggled at first but it quickly became easier after they negotiated meaning a couple of times with some key language such as not here, in my case, bottom/top/right/left line, on the corner, for example. After they mentioned all the differences I stopped the task and told them they had found them all.

As they talked, I took the notes you can see below and after they finished we worked on some emergent language and I gave them some feedback. Then, I asked them to study the feedback board for three minutes before we tried the task again.

I deleted the old pictures from our chats and sent the new ones. Same pictures but exchanged A and B.

Students repeated the task and performed much better than the first time, as expected. I gave them some final feedback focusing on what changed from attempt 1 to attempt 2.

The students were very excited at the end of the lesson and said “A gente tá falando muito, teacher! (We’re speaking a lot, teacher!)” meaning they feel they’re developing. What a good day today.