Activity for authentic writing task: Will you skype with us?

A couple of months ago in my French II class, I was going to give an oral performance evaluation and, like always, was trying to decide what I would have the students do while they were waiting to take the assessment.  Even though we don't concentrate on writing in the first semester of French II, I like to ask them to do a little from time to time.  So, I thought this was as good a time as any to come up with a short writing task about the theme for the unit- family.

I decided simultaneously that it would be nice if they knew more Francophone celebrities (me, too, for that matter!) and so I started searching for them on line.  As I found more and more lists of famous francophone-born actors, singers, artists, writers and others, I imagined what it would be like if we could get them to skype with us.  From this, the assignment was born.

I had each student choose a slip of paper from a bag.  The paper had two names of two different celebrities: one to look up and the other as an identity.  The student had to look up the one they were writing to and find out why they are famous; then, they had to look up info on that celebrity's family.  Once they did this, they had to write an email introducing themselves to the celebrity, telling them what they knew about the celebrity's family and presenting information on their own families, making sure to note if they had anything in common (I see you have an older sister; I also have a sister, but she's younger).  at the end of the email, they had to ask the celebrity to skype with our class.

After writing the email, they had to send it to a partner in the class (whose identity is the celebrity they researched).  The partner then had to respond to the email as the celebrity, first thanking them for the email and then saying whether they would skype with the class or not.

I had them copy me on these emails so I could use them as writing samples.  I plan on having them work on these emails second semester and actually sending them to the real celebrities to see if we can get one of them to skype with us.  The rubric I used to grade them was adapted from the Jefferson County proficiency rubrics.

The can-do statements for this are many, but these are the most important for my purposes:

• I can research a person and learn about their family.
• I can begin and end an email in the appropriate way.
• I can type basic information about myself and my family in an email.
• I can compare my family with another family.
• I can ask someone to do something for me.