Penpals

I organized penpal exchanges for my students for many years.  First I found an American colleague who taught French so that our students could exchange letters.  I asked my students to write a letter presenting themselves in French.  It's very important that the correspondents write in their native language.  Forcing them to write in their L2 is like pulling teeth and does not improve their writing ability at all.  When they receive a letter written in their target language they're motivated to read it.  They learn lots of expressions used by other teenagers and they quickly adopt them. 

When my students' letters arrived, the American teacher tried to match them with students who had similar interests.  Then we made up a master list to see who was writing to who.  It would take ten days, sometimes more for the letters to get back to me.  You can't imagine how excited the students were when I arrived with a bundle of letters.  Even the ones who had dragged their feet about writing were excited to get a reply.  I usually had to give the entire hour over to helping them read their letters and preparing answers.  I always had to explain what "hanging out,"  Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior meant.  Homecoming and Prom were other things that French teenagers know nothing about.  Krashen says that reading is what helps most to learn a language if there is compelling input.  Letters from an American teenager were highly compelling input.

I tried to send a batch of letters every month.  That meant collecting them, checking who had not written, and mailing them.  I got the school to pay the postage.  Students often wanted to add pictures, cds and other small objects to their letters.  I had to be careful that this didn't get out of hand because it added to the weight, thus to the postage.

Why not use the internet?  I told my students that they were free to exchange e-mail addresses and communicate that way as often as they liked.  Aren't I nice?  But I also wanted a written letter for the class.  It would have been hard for me to control what was going on by internet, so I didn't even try.  On the other hand, I could look over their letters and be sure there was nothing inappropriate in them.

Once they had exchanged a couple batches of letters, we worked on creating a mini-film to send to our correspondents.  The students introduced themselves to the camera and filmed our school and the town center.  They enjoyed working on the project and everyone participated.  It was output, but it was Real, not an activity invented just to get them to say something.  We usually did the introductions in English and the explanations for tourists either in French or in both languages.  We sent our CD to the States and received one from the American school that the students watched with great interest.

For many students this exchange was their first and only occasion to use English to communicate with real people.  They enjoyed it immensely.