Investigation A
Reconstructing a strip story is a language-learning task that meets all of the criteria listed by Ellis (2000). This is how to set it up:
- Select a short but complete text – for example, a short narrative or a description. Even a text as short as the following could be used with five group members.
A compound of sulphur that is easily recognised by its unpleasant smell is hydrogen sulphide (H2S).
It is a gas that is found in thermal places such as Rotorua, in New Zealand.
This gas is poisonous.
Small quantities are enough to cause dizziness, headaches, and nausea.
- Cut the text into strips and distribute them among members of the group or class. You need as many strips as there are participants (about 10 strips is the maximum number that works well for interaction). A strip should not be too long, as the students have to memorise the text on it. The strip does not need to be a whole sentence; the first of the sentences above would be a good one to split in two.
- After you have given the students a few minutes to memorise their strips, take them back.
- Now ask the students to reconstruct the text, without helping them or intervening in any way.
- Observe and take notes on the types of interaction between participants.
- Think about how far this language-learning task resembles Ellis’s descriptions, above, of tasks that encourage productive interaction and negotiation.
- Engage in some language analysis to find out why some sentences come before others (for example, why we talk about ‘a gas’ before ‘this gas’ or why we generally use the word ‘it’ only after the noun that ‘it’ refers back to. This helps the students become aware of language forms.
After this activity, you could build on it in the following ways.
- Prepare a different type of text for a subsequent strip-story activity. Note, however, that the task will no longer be entirely unfamiliar to students and they will have worked out some processes to get it done more efficiently, although probably with less language-based interaction.
- Vary the conditions of the task to reduce the students’ familiarity with the process when they do it again (for example, by changing the group size, or the length of text to be memorised, or by giving them parts of sentences rather than whole sentences).
- Bilingual Pasifika students who share a language can easily reconstruct a strip story in their language. If they are in two groups, each group could make the activity strips for the other group.
