Step Six: Student Presentation – Show and Tell!

At this point in class, your students have been warmed up, you are organized, you covered some great grammatical topic, you’ve gone over homework, and you’ve discussed a short story. Now it’s time to turn the floor over completely to your students. Remember back in kindergarten and first grade when Fridays were “Show and Tell” Days? You were able to bring in a favorite object, show it to your classmates, and tell a little about it?

I suggest that every Friday in class you have a “Show and Tell” time. Students can prepare in advance, of course, bringing in some object to show to their classmates. I would have each student speak for a minimum of twenty seconds and a maximum of thirty seconds. Encourage your students to practice the night before with a clock. The most deadly oral presentations are the ones that go on too long!

Your goal here is simple. It is back to the “tip of the ice cream cone.” (I will present the “tip of the ice cream cone” in a subsequent newsletter under the heading New or Old Grammar?) You want your students to feel comfortable speaking all on their own! You want them – in front of all of their classmates – to look good. Encourage them to have good posture when they speak. Encourage them to look out at their audience. Allow them to have notes – even the whole presentation written out – if they agree to have good eye contact! Tell them that volume is key. If fellow students can’t hear them, they might as well just hand out a written summary of what they want to say.

A show and tell has the advantage of having a prop. Students should actually bring in something to show. Here are some examples:

baseball glove	picture of a favorite singer	bag of potato chips
compact disc	hairbrush	model car

Let’s say a beginning student showed a picture of Ricky Martin. The show-and-tell might go like this:

Buenos días. Ricky Martin es un cantante magnífico. Canta mucho. Mi canción favorita de Ricky se llama “Livin’ la vida loca.”  Ricky es de Puerto Rico. Ricky es alto, inteligente y muy guapo. Tengo dos discos compactos de Ricky Martin. Un día voy a su concierto. Muchas gracias.

Note that the student greeted her classmates at the beginning and thanked them at the end.
An advanced student might “show” the same picture, but could do something a little more sophisticated:

Buenos días. Ricky Martin es mi cantante favorito. Nació en Puerto Rico, pero ahora vive en Miami. Cuando era joven, cantaba en el grupo Menudo. Luego actuaba en una telenovela famosa, Days of our Lives. Ahora hace muchos videos, viaja por todas partes del mundo y ayuda a gente pobre y enferma. Un día me gustaría conocer a Ricky, pero por ahora puedo ver esta foto cada noche en mi habitación. Gracias.

In many ways, the importance of this exercise is simply having a student stand alone in front of classmates speaking Spanish or French. You encourage them. You applaud after the presentation. Remember, students are vulnerable in a new language. You need to bolster confidence. But you also can’t protect them too much. A “show-and-tell” is a wonderful combination of independence and support – you’re having your students stand and speak in front of classmates, but you’re not hanging them out to dry in case they lose their footing.  (You’ve encouraged them to come prepared with notes or even a full script should something happen.)  Sometimes, I have a script or notes due the day before the actual in-class presentation. This practice allows me to help students fix the grammar or choose a better, more appropriate word. By “show-time,” I want them to look good and feel like stars.

The “show-and-tell” technique can take many forms. You can narrow the focus, picking a theme for a particular week’s “show-and-tell.”  Often, I will have it follow the theme of the vocabulary words in the Breaking the Barrier series: food, clothing, sports, high-tech, winter, travel, etc.

Another theme can be geographically or culturally based. In the Breaking the Barrier series, each chapter has a country map, full of information that begs for further investigation! There is a list of foods, interesting sites, and lists of famous people who came from that country. For some show and tells, I ask each student to pick one of the bits of information on these country maps. I encourage them to go to the library or Internet to find out more information to share with their classmates.

Here is a sample page from a Breaking the Barrier book. As you can see, the information here seems to be begging for further research!