It gets your students talking and sharing opinions but also gives you a chance to listen in and to understand their motivation and attitudes towards languages.

Preparation

Make a copy of the discussion statements and cut them into strips so those students can take one statement at a time and discuss it. Add some statements of your own if your students have specific language issues they may want to discuss.

Procedure

• Put your students into groups of four or five and give each group a statement.

• Let them discuss the statement for a few minutes while you monitor and feed in any language they need.

• Then rotate the statements around the groups.

• Once all the students have discussed all the statements you might want to have a class vote to see what the consensus of opinion is on these statements and share some of your own opinions and insights.

 Discussion statements

This activity was originally published in December 2007