In the summer of 2022, I was lucky to attend a seminar put on by the Goethe Institut titled “Sprache, Landeskunde, und kulturelles Lernen” that explored the concept of integrative Landeskunde in language instruction. That is, exploring how to teach our students not only facts about our Target Cultures, but also skills of intercultural communicative competence and discourse about cultural phenomena – all through the Target Language. It was an absolute blast to take the course entirely in German with German teachers from four continents, and the ABC-Quiz stuck out to me as a fun way to get students thinking, moving, and engaging with cultural concepts.
Why should you do it? Because our dear kids need a bit more movement in their school day, even if it is just a little bit of standing up and walking around! Plus, they tend to get competitive about finding the “right” answers, which ups the engagement factor as they think about cultural Products, Practices, and Perspectives.
When do I use the ABC-Quiz?
The ABC-Quiz is primarily an input-oriented activity as students read and process questions about cultural phenomena in the Target Cultures, voting with their feet as to what they believe to be the correct answer, and it can be inserted into a unit just about anywhere – either to introduce a topic and relevant vocabulary, or to extend learning about a given topic.
If you use an ABC-Quiz early in a unit, you will definitely want to preview new vocab in some meaningful context, or build in that contextualization into the Quiz itself.
In this example slideshow that I can use very early in my German 1 course, new academic vocabulary is bolded, and contextualized given students’ knowledge about the world. Even if they maybe think that “Hauptstadt” means “largest city” at first, they quickly learn that it means “capital,” and can then use that knowledge immediately for the next prompt to guess / state Germany’s capital. The number ranges in the population and number of states questions also give clues as to what is being talked about before students are asked to guess facts about Germany, based first on their learning the new vocabulary in German as relates to the home country (in my case, the USA).
Otherwise, the vocabulary in this example is very limited to basically “is,” “has,” and then names of countries! With more language proficiency, students will obviously be able to read and contextualize more information and new vocabulary.
How do I do it? – Logistics
The main principle of this activity is that students are given a multiple choice question, and move to a designated part of the classroom to indicate what they believe to be the correct answer. You can simply use scrap paper, writing “A” “B” and “C” in large print on three separate sheets, and then lay those sheets across the front of your classroom to designate three areas. Perhaps you already have a “Four Corners” procedure with country names, cardinal directions, or some other indicators in your classroom that you can use in the same way.
You will also need to prepare either some slides, or, much more challengingly, an oral text with multiple choice questions about your Target Cultures. This can range from geographical facts, like in the example above, to questions about the Products and Practices of your Target Cultures. See below for more inspiration in this regard!
How do I do it? – Procedure
- Explain to your students that you will be asking them questions to see what they already know about the Target Cultures (and maybe also their Home Cultures!).
- Tell learners that they will answer the questions you ask by moving to what they believe to be the correct answer, and indicate the areas for A, B, and C (or whatever other system you use in your room).
- Start with a question that could be fairly easy to answer, and model wondering aloud about any new vocabulary that might show up. Referring to the example above, maybe you say, with special emphasis on the italicized words, “[In the L2] The capital…of the United States is…Los Angeles…New York…or Washington DC.? Hmm…the capital. What does capital mean? I wonder…What do you think? Go to A, B, or C, and we’ll learn together!”
- Reveal the answer to the question, and celebrate all students’ answers. Reread the complete sentence with the correct answer in it, and do a comprehension check on any new vocabulary (or maybe even the meaning of the whole sentence) by asking, for example, “[In L2] What does capital mean in English?” Celebrate the answers you get for that!
- You can easily reinforce new vocabulary by asking follow up questions using the newly-learned word, indicating with a gesture when students can give a choral response (or if maybe they should just shout it out). “[In L2] Ah, so Washington, DC is the capital of the United States! Is [our city] the capital of [our state]? What is the capital of [our state]? What is the capital of France?” All along the way, restate the correct answers, using the new vocabulary, in complete sentences.
- Continue on asking content questions, having students move, showing the correct answer, and extending the input with further questioning. If you want to make sure any new academic vocabulary really sticks, you might limit yourself to 3-5 new terms that you use in a variety of contexts throughout the activity.
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
Because you may be introducing new information to students through this activity, it is recommended that you follow up with some sort of review activity. Maybe you do a Write and Discuss with your students about what they learned, or just engage in some oral questioning.
In the example slideshow above, I provide students a gap-fill reading that reviews all the information students learned in a short paragraph that uses connecting words like “and” and “but.” It is simple enough for a Novice learner to understand, and all they have to provide in that example is place names and numbers! You could confirm correct answers as a class by reading the completed paragraph aloud, and then have students complete a Volleyball Translation in pairs. Gap fill paragraphs like this could easily have larger gaps or more complex clauses for students with higher proficiency, like “When entering a restaurant in Germany, it is polite to…” or “Something that is similar to my culture is that…”
This activity is a great way to discuss cultural Products and Practices, so written reflection or discussion about the underlying Perspectives is also a natural place to go after an activity like this. I like ACTFL’s reflection question that is included in the Intercultural Can Do reflections: “What new insights about yourself and others have you gained from thinking about this?”
Pro Tips!
- Extend the learning! To drive up the amount of input and thinking in the activity, make a discussion out of every answer. Use new target vocabulary to ask personalized and knowledge questions, and share experiences with any cultural phenomena come up.
- Follow up! A gap-fill text, multiple choice questions, whatever – just make sure that students have to recall the information they learned. It can get exciting to move around and try to “win” during activities like this, so it helps to have a paper-to-pencil component that confirms what was learned and what might need reinforcement.
- Go beyond facts and products! For illustrative purposes, my examples above use geographic facts about Germany, but we could train our students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence even further by discussing social situations and phenomena that students may discover in the Target Cultures. (This would be the Practices P of the 3 Ps!) Let the image below provide some inspiration for possible topics for an ABC-Quiz:
