This week in Year 9, students are playing reading games so they can have fun exploring the Japanese language.  Today we played a game called ‘Airplane translation’ (developed by Jason Fritze).  To the students, it was an excuse to throw paper planes in the classroom, but in teaching terms, the students got multiple repetitions of a comprehensible text (but I like to think of it in terms of waxing cars, painting fences and sanding floors).

In the game, students got into pairs and wrote a portmanteau of their name on a blank piece of paper (for example Phoebe and Abbey became ‘Phlabbey’).  They then looked at a short story projected onto the board.  The students scanned the story (first instance of reading) and found a sentence which they are familiar with (second instance) and wrote it down in English.  They then turned the piece of paper into a plane, got into teams and threw them at each other from across the room.  They picked up another groups plane, read the English sentence and searched the projected reading (third instance) to find it and then wrote down the next sentence (forth reading) in English again.

We did this a few times and it turned out that reconstructing someone’s dodgy plane was the most difficult part of the task (but at least it wasn’t the reading).  Once the students finished the game each group effectively had a translated version of the story, which was great, but in reality the heavy lifting in terms of learning had already been done and they didn’t really need a translation. We will most likely recommission our old planes into a paper balls and play ‘Trashketball’ next lesson (look it up). 

By the end of the game some students were beginning to really know the story backwards, which puts us in a good position to try ‘Cold Character Reading’ (Terry Waltz).  This is where students explore a familiar story but written in more advanced Japanese scripts (Katakana and Kanji) with ZERO pre-teaching.  It is a fascinating and enviable time to be involved in language learning and teaching.