Mastering Circumlocution: Enhance Your Spanish Skills Now

Circumlocution Exercise

This past week in my Spanish 4 class, we did a short lesson on circumlocution: the art of leveraging the words you know to substitute for a word you don’t know or one that has evaded you in the moment. We do this to an extent in English — when we don’t know a word, we’ll use the colloquial placeholder “thingamajig.” Well, in world language, we want our conversations to be a bit richer!

This video delves into that lesson. Here’s how we approached it:

We talked about the purpose of circumlocution. I find that when students understand the purpose of an activity, they have clarity and are better able to accomplish the task.
We practiced with the word “plane.” I had them work in pairs to come up with a way to describe it. I heard “carro del cielo” and “máquina del cielo.” All great attempts!
Then I wrote 4 common words, which they had to describe using circumlocution. It went really well. See my picture below (real picture is in the video, my handwriting is too messy!)

A graphic illustrating various terms: 'Forest', 'Plane', 'University', and 'Wallet', each with a brief description in Spanish.

Graphic promoting a new blog post and video about circumlocution, featuring a quote from an educator about encouraging students to practice this technique. The design includes a smiling woman with a blue bow in her hair, and bright, engaging colors.

I realized that I always encourage students to use circumlocution, but haven’t quite engaged in activities that guide students to create, utilizing the language they are acquiring. Most of my lessons on circumlocution have been at the moment. Maybe a “ how do we say this or that.” Well, method got an upgrade this week. ! I did a short lesson on circumlocution, and it really pushed students to be resourceful. The lesson’s theme was “Work with what you have.” Here’s what I did:

We talked about the purpose of circumlocution. I find that when students understand the purpose of an activity, they have clarity and are better able to accomplish the task.
We practiced with the word “plane”. I have them work in pairs to come up with a way to describe the plane. I got “carro del cielo” and “máquina del cielo” . Those were pretty good!
Then I gave them 4 common words and they had to describe. It went really well. See my picture below.

How I plan to capitalize on this skill:

Structure prompts: I plan to provide them with bell work prompts with words for which they have to describe using other words–to strengthen that muscle and spark creativity.
In the moment: When students are working on a writing project, as soon as more than 4 people ask me how to say a word, we’re going to stop and engage in some circumlocution.

What else would you add to this strategy? The lesson was very engaging and pushed these AI dependent students out of their comfort zone.

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