Practical Proficiency Podcast
Where world language teachers gather to transition to proficiency oriented instruction through comprehensible input. All through practical, real-life, teacher-friendly ideas that make teaching language more joyful! Hosted by Devon of La Libre Language Learning.
Practical Proficiency Podcast
UNIT IDEAS: Description - Physical and Personality Traits Units for Proficiency-Oriented Instruction
The ability to describe people - both physically and by personality - isn't just another vocabulary list in your world language curriculum. It's a pivotal developmental milestone on your students' language journey, marking their transition from me-centered language to a broader world of expression.
Devon Gunning breaks down why description skills serve as the defining characteristic separating novice low, mid, and high levels according to the latest ACTFL Performance Descriptors.
This episode provides age-appropriate strategies for making description relevant and engaging, with practical activities you can implement immediately: celebrity "Guess Who" games, dating app profiles for fictional characters, picture talks, and multimodal matching activities that provide abundant comprehensible input.
For Romance language teachers, Devon offers a refreshing perspective on teaching grammatical gender - skip the extensive rules and instead provide pattern-rich input that allows students to discover the patterns themselves.
Resources Mentioned:
French 1 Physical Descriptions Task Cards
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/French-1-Physical-Description-Vocabulary-Adjective-Agreement-Games-10690811
Practical Proficiency Curriculum with Units: https://lalibrelanguagelearning.mykajabi.com/practical-proficiency-curriculum-world-language-info
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What's up? Que lo que Et salut world language teachers. Welcome to the Practical Proficiency Podcast, where we make the transition to proficiency-oriented instruction in your world language class in a way that works for you, your unique context and teaching style, and doesn't sacrifice your well-being along the way. I'm your host, devon Gunning, the teacher author, conference host, curriculum creator and consultant behind La Libre Language Learning. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you who's ready to ditch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition-driven instruction and CI overnight. You're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy instead of adding to your plate. With practical, authentic and down-to-earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel or more training, we'll work together towards the magic of a community-based, target language-rich classroom, rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go, hey, hey. World language teacher, welcome back. We are here for an exciting episode that is a part of our mini-sode series, all about unit ideas. So get excited. Think about this as when you need to have that an idea session, for when you know you have a unit coming up and you want simple ideas for how you can make it more proficiency oriented, more fun, more joyful, more practical for how you can make it more proficiency oriented, more fun, more joyful, more practical, and that lovely planning session that you wish you had with your awesome colleagues, but right here in your earbuds. Let's go. These unit ideas mini-sodes are so much fun for me, so I can't wait to keep working towards more units for you, but if you're teaching an upcoming unit and you need some ideas for it, feel free to let me know. Dm me on Instagram or send me an email. You'll get an answer faster through email because I do check that more often. But let me know what you have coming up. You can even text the podcast now. Isn't that wild. I'm so excited about that new feature. So contact me to let me know what new units that you have coming up, and I would love to do a mini-sode about it, but without further ado.
Speaker 1:This one in particular is all about the skill of describing and for many of you in level one, that comes through some sort of either physical or personality traits unit. So let's get into it. Here are the ideas that I have for you. First of all, why do we do this unit? It seems an interesting choice for level one, so I wanted to give you some context as to why this is a very common unit in either your proficiency-based curriculum or your textbook. That claims to be proficiency may or may not be true TBD depends on the publisher but this is a very common unit to do with level one students or even level twos, if you have not done it yet. But here's why.
Speaker 1:Let's look first at the language functions for Actful that came out through the new performance descriptors released in 2024, just last year. They're brand spanking new. They're so good. It makes it a lot easier to understand what Actful is expecting of us when we're working with students at each of the different levels. This skill in particular that we're honing in on is the ability to describe someone or something, which is a key novice skill. It's one of the big performance indicating skills on the performance indicators for a novice, if you can do this barely, but it's there in list form, you're novice low. If you can do it barely, but it's there in list form, your novice low. If you can do it but with a lack of confidence and you need a lot of scaffolding, your novice mid. And if you can do it confidently in a few maybe not so original, but in a few sentences at least. Then you're a novice high.
Speaker 1:So description is the key indicator of what type of novice your student is, and it is the key, central, focal point all those good terms to describe what actually is a novice and what are they capable of doing. So it's important to have some sort of description unit in your level one program. At some point you could be describing ice cream, it doesn't really matter, as long as your students are working towards the skill of describing something in their immediate environment that they work with or see often. And for many people that means well, why don't we just describe ourselves and then move forward into describing other people? Because then they can get used to that third person form which is so crucial to language and expression. And here we are with the physical and personality traits unit. For some people it's just personality traits. It doesn't really matter either way that you're going about this. If this is something that you are doing, I've got ideas for you.
Speaker 1:So in the actual performance indicators the language functions start with the self and then moving into others and the environment around them. So describing other people, the skill of physical and personality traits fits into that crucial language function that your students need to drop to. I mean move to from being all about themselves in their language abilities to start moving around them into another sphere, which is describing something around them or describing another person. So it does become more difficult the more areas of spheres you have to jump through. So there's the self, like me, myself and I. My immediate environment is the next one People I know that whole deal, and then me with other people is a whole nother sphere, and then the world in general and things in general and ideas in general, and then you go into things and ideas in multiple timeframes and moves and tenses. That's a larger area and sphere. That's a whole tangent that we. That will show you, though, that how the different levels of language functions progress.
Speaker 1:So for your students to jump from the first one me myself and I to others, they need to be able to describe, and that's what this unit does. So if you got something different but still serves that same function, then go for it. Doesn't matter. However, many people have some sort of describing others unit or even describing themselves, students describing themselves. It's a really natural transition.
Speaker 1:So we often miss this in curriculum development, but we we do this thing where we're like okay, we need to hit the skill of students, need to be able to do lists okay, now they need to be able to do lists. Okay, now they need to be able to do phrases. Okay, now they need to be able to do sentences. But where's the transition between those ideas? How are you supporting them? From one jump to the other, and that's where you get a lot of students who are stuck in that middle ground between phrases and sentences. They just can't make that jump. So describing themselves and others in the same unit allows them to do that, because you're working with that familiar language of what they've already done with you for a few months.
Speaker 1:Of me myself, I, yo, yo, yo, me gusta, je suis that whole deal of I am. And then they start moving more with, like, okay, he, she is, or they, if you're using the more gender neutral pronoun, anything like that. So moving from the self to the other is a nice, natural transition that this unit can do for you. So just to give you some context onto why this is really popular, that's why it can be so useful. So how can we make that transition and that description piece very real, world and compelling, describing self and others. I mean, yeah, it's a very real world skill. You don't really have to work hard to make that real world, because it is Describing yourself and others very important. So what about the compelling piece? How can we make this wildly interesting for students? That's where the fun comes in and this is where you can really get a great unit. So here are some ideas I have for you.
Speaker 1:Why not describe really interesting people and think first who would be interesting to your students? Depending on the age group of your students, it depends on what they really, really care about. If you're working with younger students, if you're in elementary school, then describing their friends and family would be really fun for them Because, again, that whole moving from the self to people around me, to people in general, to ideas about people in general like that's the same growth and development phase that your brain goes through. So if you're working with like six and seven year olds, they would love nothing more than to talk about themselves and if you're working with 10 to 11 year olds, they really want to talk about their friends and their family. They're going to have so much fun with that and maybe a little bit about like famous people in their world but and like favorite characters and movies and stuff. But mostly they're going to want to talk about the people in their immediate environment.
Speaker 1:Middle schoolers and high schoolers are absolutely fascinated by other people. They do not want to talk about themselves at all. Why? It's a weird transition phase for them. You know they don't really want eyes on them. I mean, some kids will really want to talk about themselves, but in reality, most kids don't really want to talk like in depth about what they look like. That's, think about yourself at age 16. Did you want to talk a lot about what you look like? Probably not. So give them the same grace if you're in that unit.
Speaker 1:I like to make this unit about other people and really interesting people. Since I always worked with high schoolers and occasionally middle schoolers, but mostly high schoolers I like to do this unit on famous people and you can even do why not? Add more of a social emotional element to it and a sociocultural learning element to it by talking about famous people from your target culture. So this is a great opportunity to dive into that. There are some really fun examples that you can do with this. I'm going to show you at the end. If you're looking for a done for you unit, I'm going to show you some some things that you can use from my own curriculum library and you can also just look at some ideas from that if that serves you better at this time. But I'm going to show you some. Just click the button and it's done for you units that you can use with this idea in mind.
Speaker 1:And all of these are built off of the concept that your students are going to need tons of examples written and things that they can listen to of people, descriptions, what they look like, what they're into, as well as all of their personality characteristics and things like that. So I would say, too, that one of my biggest hints and ideas for you is that if you are going into this unit being like, yes, this is going to be the unit where I teach and really hit on masculine and feminine, if you teach a romance language, like I do, then I would caution you to not spend too much time on this in the novice area only because masculine and feminine is one of those things that your students are going to need to revisit multiple times in a spiral program, so your students will at first be able to explain the rule to you, because the rules are fairly simple, honestly, but you know as well as I do that it does not mean that they're able to produce the rule accurately. So it's better for them to simply see examples rather than you explaining to them a ton about what masculine and feminine is. Because, honestly, if you show them, think of it this way, flip the script a little bit. If you gave them four biographies, two are men, two are women, and they're consistently spelled differently. Each of the same adjectives, they have consistent differences and they sound different because of, like, the O's and the A's and all of that, or, you know, the E's in French.
Speaker 1:If that's the case, then your students will eventually pick up on the idea that, oh, this looks different. Whether you're male or female, I am seeing some sort of difference. What is it? And they'll ask you what it is, and you can say, okay, well, look at the adjective for friendly, look at the adjective for artistic, look at the adjective for athletic. What do you see is on the end of all of these? Do you see some instances where there's not an ending change? And see if they can figure it out themselves and notice it themselves first, and then that can be your whole lesson of oh okay, that's the difference.
Speaker 1:It will be much more of a success, this whole lesson on grammar, when you're talking about masculine and feminine and adjective agreement, when they actually care about it, when they've seen it in context and realize, oh, this makes a huge difference in the language. This is something I should know about and pay attention to. A pop-up grammar would work better. So that would be the way that I would approach this whole unit in general is instead focus on that skill of students being able to describe someone, a person, in a few doesn't have to be original or unique or even connected sentences, but a few disjointed sentences. They should be able to describe someone accurately, and that's going to involve a little bit of work on masculine and feminine, maybe a little bit of work in some other grammar areas, but mostly it's going to be about expanding their vocabulary and expanding their ability to form sentences, which is very different from accuracy. They need a lot of input in order to form sentences. So that's my spiel on that.
Speaker 1:What are some of the activities you can do? This is the fun part, right? So if your focus of this unit for describing people, either their physical or their character traits. You should do tons of examples of you describing other people. You could describe the students that you have in the room and I would not do too much of like their physical descriptions unless you're talking about simple things like hair and eye color. But you can also do things like show. I mean, every teacher has something like this, you know, like a slide deck of 30 pictures of random celebrities and you're just describing celebrities. Everybody has something like that. So keep that in mind. Do a lot of those. Do games like Guess who, where you're describing celebrities or famous people or interesting people, people in your school. Anything like that would be really fun for them. How much can you do with movie characters or at least show characters, things like that, that they would be familiar with and you could do a lot of description with? You can also do all kinds of games with like you know who's the bad guy, who's the good guy, and give do a lot of description with. You can also do all kinds of games with like you know who's the bad guy, who's the good guy and give them a bunch of different circumstances and things that they could work with. I would also say too.
Speaker 1:A great way that you can get a ton of input with describing people and help build their linguistic capacity to write sentences through seeing you do it and hearing you make complete sentences about this is do Pictionary with categories of people and describe things. Just describe, describe, describe, describe, describe and see if they can draw better pictures of it. I would also do lots of listening practice. If you can do, if you can find anything where people are describing themselves or describing each other, that would be really really helpful and then a really fun project or activity that you could do. That would be absolutely hilarious. You can either do it with fictional people or you can have them pick real people to do, or it could be for them. Why not? Is have them do a dating app profile where they're describing themselves and making themselves look real good and they could put a picture what they like to do. Or it could be, you know, like for somebody in their life that they know you know needs a man or needs a lady friend. That would be really, really funny. They would enjoy that. How much can you do with images with this? Do you have some printouts or any kind of cards that you can do? Lots and lots of visuals and do all kinds of tactile description, things Like can you do like a Mr Potato type deal where you bring in Mr Potato and you list the kind of character, personality and physical traits that the Mr Potato head has and students have to build it based off of what you describe like? Stuff like that would be so fun. So those are all different ideas that I have for you on ways that you can make this unit really fun and describing people.
Speaker 1:I've even seen an activity before that I used to use in my classroom. I don't remember who it's buyer. I would give you the link, but it was something about you had to. Oh my gosh, I wish I remember made it, but it's such a good idea. It's a creator on TPT. If this is you and you're listening, let me know. If this is you, I'd love to link it. But it was a great activity I used to use in my classroom where it was a person, a picture of, just like a sketch of an outline of human being, and you would flip a coin outline of human being and you would flip a coin for and the coin how many times you flipped it would give different traits and the people and your students had to draw those traits on the body and it was really, really fun. Like they would. Um, they would draw like, oh, the person was tall or was short or had blonde hair or had curly hair or had black eyes or had green eyes, like that it was. It was interesting. So you can do things like that too. I would say as well as many picture talks as you can do, where you're describing people. But you're set. Now here's my favorite final project to do with something like a description unit and as well.
Speaker 1:A note for this is that if the whole idea of doing physical traits kind of makes you feel like I don't know if I want to do that, that's not really that important. Skip it, it's not that important. All you're doing is making sure that your students have ways that they can describe another person, so you don't have to spend a ton of time on physical traits if you don't want to, or you could even skip some of the physical traits. Like you don't like a lot, it can be difficult in a diverse classroom to talk about physical traits, so you don't, and you also don't want to be doing a lot of things where you're like talking about what people's bodies look like in a middle and high school classroom. Like it's very hard to do that. You can just skip it, it's fine's fine, it's not a big deal. It's not like they won't be able to interact with a native speaker if they don't know how to say their eye color. That's not that important. We're just using this as a tool, as a vehicle, to describe things. However, character traits are helpful, so things like you know, I am artistic, I am shy, I'm outgoing Like that stuff that they'll want to be able to say to other people, so I would include those.
Speaker 1:Now, my favorite final project to do is doing something like an Instagram profile where they have to do it about a famous person of their choosing I like to keep it to a Francophone or somebody from the Latine community or the Hispanic community and they can do some sort of compare and contrast, writing with this as well, talking about themselves and other people, what they have in common. But there's also another idea that I have for you is where you can also do something like an interview project or, if you wanted to make this more of an interpersonal focus, where you could have students pair up with each other and they have to ask each other questions, maybe even as that celebrity. That would be fun. So check out those ideas and see if anything really speaks to you. Now. If you're looking for ways to make this a bit easier on you from the classroom teacher perspective, I'm going to show you some ready-made activities for you today so that you can get started on this right away, especially if you're doing this unit right now and you're like I need some help with this. So if you're a French teacher, I have an activity that's right here, ready to go for you, and it is a physical description, vocabulary card game, as well as a bunch of multimodal activities to get the job done in your class. If you're watching the video here and if you're listening, I'll give you the link to the video below in the show notes. You can see what some of these activities look like.
Speaker 1:But what I used to do with this activity with my students is they would get these cut up cards. One side has a picture of a student on it and then the other card, which is actually a totally separate card, has three written descriptions in very simple French of what that person looks like. So you would match up the descriptions with those people and it's like a little guess who game. There are 32 full color and 32 black and white cards and the descriptions, yes, still work with black and white because they're very generic descriptions. They're things like do they have glasses, hair, eye color, all that kind of things. Are they wearing a ponytail? It's very simple. So they have their physical descriptions. This also includes the answer key.
Speaker 1:But the reason I really love this activity and why I like to recommend it to you is because it is multimodal. There is this activity here where they have to cut out the phrases that describes the person. Then they have to match it with that picture. That's an individual activity, and then there's also a partner activity where there's listening and speaking. There's two different versions here, where one person has the descriptions of the people and one other person has the images and they have to describe the images to each other and match them up.
Speaker 1:Some of the great benefits of this, too, is that all of the language is ready for novice Lowe's to use. So, no matter where this comes in your year, it's ready for you to use, and I would encourage you to do the same thing. If you're making this activity on your own is if you're putting pictures together and matching it up with the guest who and doing it yourself, that the language needs to be very simple for them to be able to work with this. I would also say, too, that the focus is not masculine and feminine and adjectives and all of that. The focus really is through context and repetition, which is the whole point of a proficiency class. We don't ignore grammar, but we know that grammar has a smaller role than we think it does, and it's more about binding with lots of clear and consistent imagery.
Speaker 1:This type of lesson here is one of those things that you prep once and then it's ready forever. You just got to cut out the sets of cards and then it's good to go make copies for your class and you're ready, and it could be potentially something that goes for even four days of your class that you could use for a lot of different things. So I'm going to show you exactly what this pdf looks like if you choose to download this here. These are the different kids that you get to work with, and I love these cards because they're from an artist who does clip art on TPT, who does anime style, and they're all middle school friendly. So all of these are middle school kids and teachers, which is why I loved using these pictures, and their art is credited in the resource as well. So these are the black and white versions, so your students will be able to match these up, and they're fun to match up too. And you know like you don't have to get janky pictures from the Internet. You'll have nice, high-quality, clear images with this one here. It comes with an answer key, and then here are the questions specifically that you can look at and all of the descriptions that you'll have. You'll see it's very common things that are part of any French 1 classroom, and then there's a lot of practice coming your way in here, and there's black and white copies of everything as well for easy printing. But this one is my favorite part, which is the InfoGap activity. I love InfoGaps. And then you have La Tapeta Mush using fly swatter so great If you are a Spanish teacher.
Speaker 1:I want to also show you something that is part of my curriculum the Practical Proficiency Curriculum. I want to also show you something that is part of my curriculum the practical proficiency curriculum. When you're part of this, you get a link to this folder that has all of these things in it, because I have a unit exactly on this idea. So let's take a look at the unit guides and all the things that are in here is you get a unit guide for this unit, spanish one. Unit three, which is famous famous people. We talk about famous people and how to describe them. So I'm going to show you this unit guide that you get, which also comes with functional chunks and lesson ideas. Let's look at the unit guide so you can see what the focus is for this unit in this unit and the same is also for French I'm going to show you the francophone version in a minute but students use vocabulary that will help them understand a person's basic description in level in lesson one and then in lesson two what do students need to understand?
Speaker 1:A variety of people's descriptions, and you'll see here the whole list of what's going on in that lesson. Lesson three students are what do they need to describe a famous person? And that's where they start getting into more of the output focused ideas, and then they're working on some conjugation ideas with you. And then lesson four is what do students need to compare themselves and others? So this is where we focus on we and some writing connector words because they're working towards this final project, and I'll show you down here what some of those are. They're working towards this final project of I can describe a famous person in detail based on my research.
Speaker 1:This is a novice mid skill and you will get with this here a famous people editable biography slide deck. So I'm going to show you this here, where you get 30 plus different members of the latino latina latina community in the simple descriptions that you get to change up if you would like to. So this box, this text box, is editable, where you can change these up here, and it's a variety of people from a variety of professions. So I have here for you activists, athletes, politicians, writers, artists the full gambit. You get all kinds of people and it'll be some people that your students know and love and some scientists and other people that your students might not have heard of, that they'll be excited to learn more about.
Speaker 1:So this is one of my favorite resources to make and there's so much that you can do with this, like you can do picture talk on picture talk on picture talk with something like this there's so much cool stuff that you can do with this, like you can do picture talk on picture talk on picture talk. With something like this, there's so much cool stuff that you can do. If you are a french teacher, the same thing is available in the french and there's a really, really cool lesson plan in here for you. That also comes with the with that vocab card section, which is I have some readings in here for you to do, some of those of biography practices, and I also have in here a project for you to do which is francophone notable, which has in here a giant list of famous francophones from all over the world, and then a template for you to do this actual Instagram project where your students can, depending on how you want, phones from all over the world, and then a template for you to do this actual Instagram project where your students can, depending on how you want to do it, write all about that famous person. So it has the instructions here and it also has a bunch of sentence starters and notes for them so that they won't be doing this all on their own. They'll have some language to make it happen. And then they have some rough draft options and and then this the project is right here and ready to go for you, but the best part is definitely the ready made for you list of famous people from around the world that your students can research.
Speaker 1:Inside the unit templates, too, there's a bunch of different ideas for how you can work through.
Speaker 1:This is the one I want how you can work through this and jump into all different ways that you can focus on this skill here through the lessons and assessments. So those are the resources that I have available for you. If you'd like to see them in real time, then check out the video video. If you're not already watching the video, the link will be below in the show notes. But in the meantime, I hope that you got from this a bunch of great unit ideas. If you're doing any kind of physical or personality traits, there's a bunch of resources that I have for you here if you're looking for something that's done for you, and maybe even they'll just give you some ideas for some things that you can do in class. So thank you so much for being here for this mini episode, all about how to use descriptions in your level one unit, whether it be about physical or personality traits, whatever that might look like, and I will see you for the next mini-sode. Bye for now.