How to Use Task Cards in Your World Language Class
Do you use task cards in your French, Spanish, Italian, or other World Language classes? Task Cards have been an integral part of my instructional practices for years because they are a super versatile way to help students improve their writing and speaking skills. Additionally, they afford my students an opportunity to implement the vocabulary and language structures they have been studying (recently and in the past!) by answering relevant, interesting questions that tie back to their personal lives. The difficulty level of the task cards I use ranges from simple to challenging, which is great for differentiation but also forces your students to…
think about language critically;
use their linguistic and extralinguistic resources to figure out what the questions are asking;
use what they already know to develop logical, well-structured answers;
take compositional risks by using language creatively to respond to the given prompt or task.
In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through how you can use task cards to help your students improve their written AND spoken communication skills while recycling target vocabulary and grammar structures from your unit and previously studied units. I will also share some of the Task Card Resources that are available in my TpT shop!
How to prepare your task cards
What I love about task cards is that they are super low prep. All I have to do is print out the task cards, cut them out, and find space in my classroom for them. I like to tape them to various spaces in my classroom (walls, whiteboard, bulletin boards, or simply on student tasks), and then have students rotate around the room as they work.
If I have some spare time, I try to print them out in color and laminate them so they last me for years. I store them in my filing cabinet and pull them out whenever I need them. I’m a strong believer in investing the time now so that I can benefit from that work in the future. By sacrificing just a bit of extra time this year, I know that I’ll have beautiful, durable task cards to use for years to come.
How to implement your task cards
On the day of the activity, I distribute a Task Card Student Answer Sheet to each student (pictured below), and explain my expectations during this assignment.
Figure out what the question is asking before you do anything.
Use your notes, your partner, WordReference, textbook, etc. as resources to help you!
Formulate a response that fulfills the following criteria:
✓ My response is a complete sentence that fully addresses the prompt /
question.
✓ In my response, there is a subject and correctly conjugated verb.
✓ My response has no errors in spelling.
Check your work! Proofread and make any necessary corrections.
You could have students work individually or in pairs. I find that the latter generally produces better results, as students can collaborate on their answers and check each other’s work. Have them rotate from card to card until they have completed all of the questions and responded in a satisfactory manner.
Once students have completed the activity, I break them up into small groups--usually three or four students, and never with the partner with whom they had previously worked--and have them systematically review each question & response, making sure to...
Read each question out loud.
Have each student share his/her response.
Compare and contrast answers for CONTENT and GRAMMAR.
Peer edit and review group members’ responses.
At this point in the review phase, I am circulating from group to group doing the following:
I assist students individually and answer any questions they may have.
I formatively assess students’ proficiency in their responses, noting common errors and misconceptions.
Once students are done, we will reconvene as a class and do a whole-class review of the most challenging questions. We will bring to the surface any struggles/difficulties students may have had and make sure that all students have appropriate answers for each question.
Make it a speaking activity!
Once I am done with the task cards, I collect them and save them for use in a subsequent class (maybe the following class, or next week, or toward the end of the marking period). When I’m ready for them, I pass out these task cards to each of my students and have them take turns asking and answering these questions out loud. (This is fantastic because they can also use their Task Card Response Sheet to verify the accuracy of their partners’ answers.)
You could have students take turns asking and answering questions in a whole-class format, or have them work with one partner at a time! In my blog post, The BEST Way to Minimize Prep Time as a World Language Teacher, I talk about repurposing activities we’ve already done to save prep time and reinforce content with students. Task cards are the perfect resource to repurpose, because you’re helping students review content they’ve already explored but in a new context: instead of writing their answers, they now have to respond extemporaneously…and seeing as though they’ve already done the “heavy lifting” of reading, processing, and responding to the questions in written format, it should be easier for them to complete this activity in a spoken context.
I hope this blog post has provided some ideas and resources for implementing task card activities in your French, Spanish, and/or Italian classes. Writing and speaking are important skills to cultivate from the very beginning of your students’ language learning journey, with the understanding that they will most likely be their weakest skills. Give them a bit of grace — you’re expecting a lot out of them, after all! — but students need to know from the very beginning that they are responsible not just for reading and listening in the target language but for writing and speaking as well.
Do you use task cards? How successful have they been in your World Language class?
Happy language teaching,
~ Michael
