About this activity
Eight open monologue prompts for /r/ generalisation: describe your weekend routine from Friday afternoon to Sunday night; explain how a person gets a driver's permit in your state; describe your favourite artist and three of their songs; argue for or against a later school start time; tell about a group project that went wrong. Long-form talking, with no target words supplied — which is the point.
How to use it in a session
Ask for a full minute of talking and stay quiet through it. The prompts are chosen to produce sustained monologue rather than exchanges, because a residual /r/ survives short turns and collapses over a minute. Do not name the targets in advance; the student's own vocabulary supplies plenty of /r/ words, and finding them is part of self-monitoring. Fifteen minutes covers two or three prompts with review.
What to listen for
Listen for the rate at which accuracy falls off. A student who is accurate for twenty seconds and not for sixty has a monitoring capacity rather than a production problem, and that number moves across weeks. Watch which vocabulary they choose — a student avoiding /r/ words has found a strategy that hides the error and does not fix it.
Carrying it home
Recording a minute of talking on a phone and listening back is the highest-value home task at this stage. It needs no adult and produces the feedback that matters.
Questions
- What ages is this for?
- Sixth through twelfth grade, for residual /r/ at the carryover stage.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all eight prompts are free to use with no account.
- Why not supply target words?
- Because conversation does not. A student who can only monitor words someone else has flagged has not generalised, and their own vocabulary supplies more than enough /r/ to work with.