Our main goal as language teachers is to help students communicate! We want them speaking more Spanish, but we know that output takes a while to develop, so we have to give them all sorts of tools. In my Spanish classroom, I have an entire bulletin board dedicated to the idea: We just have to make ourselves understood, and we do that with circumlocution.
Have you ever been in a situation where you just couldn’t think of the word? Maybe you needed an ingredient for a dish or an item from a hardware store. How did you get it? Did you ask for help? Did you gesture with your hands to describe the size and shape, describe the texture or color, explain what it would be used for? If you did any of those things, than you were engaging in circumlocution – talking in circles.
These spanish posters (available in Spanish, French, and English, and now as a Zoom Background) help students do just that. I get my students in the habit of using these posters in spanish when we define vocabulary terms. Instead of writing escuela = school, we practice writing “un lugar para estudiantes” (a place for students). I gain buy-in from students by telling them we are writing riddles for our classmates to guess.
We will also play heads up, an interactive game to practice speaking in Spanish.
How to play
1. One student faces away from the board.
2. I project a picture or word on the screen behind them.
3. The class has to describe the word, using circumlocution to speak in Spanish, so that their classmate to guess. With my true novice students, I let the student in the hot seat guess the word in English, but the class has to describe it in Spanish. It’s a lot of fun!
Virtual learning adaptation
During virtual learning, I created a series of backgrounds for Zoom or Google Meet. Students could see the Spanish posters behind me and use them to speak more Spanish during online sessions.
Additional ways to motivate students to speak more Spanish
These posters and games are only one tool in my kit for helping students to speak more Spanish. Modeling is the best tool you can provide. I also have three classroom routines that help create an environment and classroom culture that promotes speaking in Spanish. These involve friendly inter-grade level competition, time goals, and holding myself accountable! Read more here!
This is exactly the kind of bulletin board that I have been thinking about doing. Thank you for sharing the visuals! This is something my students can truly benefit from. And I like how you describe it as “writing riddles” for the other students to guess. Very creative!
Very good and useful idea!