Guided Conversations for Performance & Proficiency

This month we’ve talked about several ways to stay focused on your curriculum, themes and grammar points (Performance) while working towards building our students’ proficiency. Another way to do this is to use Guided Conversations for Performance and Proficiency.

What Is A Guided Conversation?

A guided conversation is a great way to work on both performance and proficiency because the teacher creates a scaffolded framework for students to converse. Interpersonal speaking is at once both the most practical skill for our students outside of the classroom and the most challenging!

A guided conversation sets up a topic for students, so they have an idea about what they will talk about before the conversation begins.

It also has a framework in which the teacher kind of tells or guides students how to keep the conversation going. These hints are general, so students still need to be creative with language.

Show Me What A Guided Conversation Looks Like

How Does It Work?

So why does using Guided Conversations for Proficiency and Performance Work? There are lots of reasons!

You can start early. This activity can adapted to Spanish 1 students, and culminate in one of the open-ended sections of the AP Spanish Exam!
You, as the teacher, get to design them! Start by designing conversations that are about your current unit of study. You can make suggestions that might lead them to use other vocabulary or grammar they’ve learned in the past. Recycling past learning is a GREAT way to help students build proficiency!
Students can use the SAME conversation guides over and over! Change their partners. Change their roles, Change the time during the unit (like midway and at the end). You will never have the exact same conversation twice!
As your students develop more skill and confidence, make the conversations broader or a bit less tied to the exact unit or theme they’re studying now.

Other Reasons To Love Guided Conversations

I have a lot of things I love about these kinds of activities!

A. You can spend a whole class (or multiple classes) using the same guided conversations. For one prep period, you can get a lot of class time planned for!

B. These make a GREAT lesson plan when you are being observed. Students talking in the TL and all actively engaged!

C. You can use them as an assessment!

D. You can use them as Test Prep for Seal of Biliteracy Tests and the AP Spanish Exam

E. If you don’t have time to make them, you can grab some “Done For You” conversations in my Web Store.