In the last post in this series, Urs has plenty of tips on how you can use roleplays with your learners to generate creativity and fluency.
My third post on speaking activities is about roleplays. These create an imaginative situation where students slip into another role. This is especially appealling to teenage learners, who often shy away from expressing personal opinions. Roleplays help you to escape the context restrictions of the classroom and offer a wealth of information about the level of your learners.
You can let your students use their imagination and creativity to invent a roleplay themselves or you can simply borrow materials from your coursebook.
Here are a few ideas you could use:
• Customer – sales assistant
• Tourist information office
• Asking the way
• Restaurant
• Hotel reception
• General inquiries on the phone
• Small talk at a party
• Interview a celebrity
Students can interact solely within their group or you can set up a performance, with every group acting out their play in front of the class. Or you could try this suggestion: hand out a basic exchange and ask your learners to change some details. Then each pair finds another pair and acts out the dialogue until the other pair is able to repeat the dialogue by heart.
A lively activity I’ve learned from David Heathfield is “Quick Pairs”.
- Pair up your class, and get each person in the pair to choose one of two roles: either policeman or lost stranger. Make it clear that this is pair 1.
- Then ask your class to pair up with a new partner. Again, let them choose between two roles: Sales assistant in a sports shop and customer. Remind the class that this is pair 2.
- Finally, ask your students to regroup a third time. In pair 3, they choose between a doctor and a patient.
- Explain that when you call out 1 they should find their partner of pair 1 and start a conversation; likewise for pairs 2 and 3. When they hear a number, students interrupt their conversation and immediately find their new partners to start/continue their conversation.
- Let them speak for 30-45 seconds before calling out another number, shortening the intervals as the roleplay develops.
Another fun activity involves placing three chairs in front of the room and labelling them as father, teenage daughter, family cat. Then the class starts asking questions and by sitting on one of the chairs, a student decides which perspective the question will be answered from.
But what is the teacher’s role during roleplays?
Before: Note some key structures/vocabulary on the board.
Before: Explain the procedure clearly. If necessary, do a test run.
While: Monitor the conversations and make a note of any persistent errors and do some remedial teaching later.
You can read more from Urs here.