Spanish teacher Carla Terry took an interesting spin on testing her students’ ability to communicate in Spanish: the students were asked to buy and sell goods to one another in class without using any English.

The students were graded on how well their dialogue was and how many items they could sell overall. Persuasion was a large factor in the activity as every group competed to get their items sold, but just being able to understand what one another were saying was also a part of the grade.

“The exercise gives them the opportunity to use the language in a contextualized way, to empower them to shop and sell items in an unfamiliarized language. No scripts, no references, just knowledge they have learned throughout class,” Terry said.

The exercise went well for the students, and ended up being a fun competition and opportunity to interact with one another in a stimulating scenario according to Terry.

“We do a lot of activities where we role play. The introverted ones tend to hide behind the script, so we’re breaking away from the scripts and the textbooks. At this point it is so much fun because they’re starting to get use to going on their own without a guided script, “Terry said.

Terry says that the exercise was an overall success. The students had fun, while exercising what they have learned in Spanish class. Giving them a real world scenario was a different approach, but proved to work as well as any test.

“I think they surprised themselves and surprised me as well. They used a lot of new vocabulary words and most importantly they realized they were able to communicate with others without the use of anything else besides prior knowledge,” Terry said.