Pace: a story-Based Approach for Dialogic Inquiry about Form

E: EXTENSION

Activities Focusing on form and working toward grammatical understandings with students are only useful if they contribute to language development as shown by the students’ ability to use this knowledge. Therefore, the Extension activity phase of PACE provides learners with the opportunity to use the new grammatical concept in creative and interesting ways in new thematically related situations while at the same time integrating the concept into existing knowledge. Extension activities should be interesting, be related to the theme of the lesson in some way, and, most importantly, allow for creative self-expression. Extension activities are not worksheets on which learners use the target form to fill in blanks of disconnected sentences; instead, they can be information-gap activities, role-play situations, dramatizations, games, authentic writing projects, paired interviews, class surveys, out-of-class projects, or simulations of real-life situations. The possibilities are endless, as long as the learners have the chance to try to use the target form in ways that they see as useful, meaningful, and connected to the overarching theme of the story. Moreover, the Extension phase of the lesson allows the teacher to address other goal areas of the standards, such as Cultures, Communities, and Connections: The Extension activities can address cultural perspectives embodied in the story bring learners into contact with target language members of the community for further investigations of the story’s country of origin, or link the story’s theme to an academic subject area.

The extension activity phase closes the circle of the PACE lesson and provides
students with the experience of observing how parts of the whole interact and
work together to produce texts of various kinds in the target language. As is the case in the Presentation phase, the Extension phase can take several days as students are engaged in multiple communicative and interpersonal activities. In the section on designing a PACE lesson, several ideas for extension activities are presented.