This is the second in a series of five posts about ways to supplement your coursebooks with extra (and hopefully innovating) speaking activities.
The first article in the series began by looking at a variety of different warm-up activities that focus particularly on speaking and interaction.
In this second article, we will go on to explore some ways that speaking dialogue models (as they appear in our coursebooks) can be utilised in more creative ways.
2. Working with speaking dialogue models
Many coursebooks feature dialogues in an effort to create positive and helpful speaking models. Here is an example from my own Boost! Speaking series:
Too often, teachers just ask the students to listen to and/or read aloud the dialogue in pairs and then move on to the next activity in the coursebook. However, these speaking models can be adapted or expanded in ways for students to gain a deeper awareness of them and start speaking activities involving dialogues in more active and dynamic ways. They can also help to incorporate ongoing speaking skills that are very rarely featured or encouraged in coursebooks - like dealing with unforeseen interruptions, or seeing how spoken language can be affected by emotional states.
2.1. Look and Listen
Speaking models are often presented in coursebooks in audio and written form and are sometimes accompanied by a situational illustration. While the written form is generally designed to provide clarity and a useful reference for the students as they work through the respective unit, it is important to facilitate experience with conversations and spoken academic input in ways that are more genuine – in short, by listening to the speakers and ‘seeing the scene’. To that end it is a good idea to have students initially listen to the audio and look at the picture without seeing the dialogue in its written form (if there is no scene illustration available, the students can be asked to try and visualize and then talk about it). This can also be useful for learners who are more visual and/or auditory in their preferred learning style. It is very easy to facilitate, with students simply covering the written text with a hand or sheet of paper while they listen and look. It is also a good idea to follow up this application with a brief discussion to see how much students have picked up from the initial situation and input.
2.2. Emotional Effect
This is a simple and fun way to make a performance (from the students) of the speaking model more humorous, but also provides useful awareness of how people’s feelings can affect the way they speak.
Allocate students to read out/perform the dialogue. Go through this one time as per usual. Ask the same students to perform the dialogue again, but this time add some kind of situational influence that could change how one or more of the speakers is feeling. For example, explain that one of the characters broke up with his/her girlfriend before the scene being played out, or someone is really scared of, angry or nervous about another person or thing in the scene. Alternatively, specific character traits can be allocated to the characters in the scene (for example “sneaky”, “hot-tempered”, “loudmouth”, “shy/meek”, “happy-go-lucky”, “sulky”, etc.) Based on this information, the student allocated to the role has to adapt the way he/she speaks to incorporate the extra situational information, using appropriate tone or even interruptions, pauses or digressions.
This can be a really entertaining experience for the students and class in general, and is sure to generate laughs. But it is also a useful reminder that speaking does not take place in an emotional vacuum, and that peoples’ characters, moods or current state of mind can have a very real effect on the way they talk.
2.3. Rolling roleplay
This activity is great for getting students to pay special attention to the initial speaking input and potentially internalize more of it right from the beginning.
Ask two (or more – depending on the exact number of speakers represented in the speaking model, but generally two) students to come out to the front of the class and perform the dialogue with their books open in front of them.
Following this, ask one of the students to close his/her book, and then have both students repeat the dialogue performance. In this instance, one student can see the model while the other cannot. Using a timer or stopwatch, time how long the second student can participate in the dialogue without stopping. That student sits down and is replaced with another. The first student (still there from the previous round) must now close his/her book while the new student can look at his/hers. Follow the same procedure, with now the first student timed to see how long he/she can continue the dialogue without stopping. That student then sits down and is replaced with a new student and the procedure continues on until most/all of the students in the class have taken part in the rolling roleplay.
While potentially a little stressful at first, students sitting down will make efforts to start remembering the text, though they won’t be sure which role they will be called up to play until it happens. In essence, the activity can become a fun and challenging one that also sees them pay very careful attention to the initial speaking model.
Teachers are advised to choose the most able or confident students to do the initial round, and leave weaker or shyer students until later in the process. The stronger students will hopefully be more capable of handling the activity with more limited preparation time and practice (and/or may not take initial failure with the activity too much to heart), while weaker students get more lead-in time and more recitals from other students to watch and learn from.
2.4. Just to add to that…
Look at the speaking model and determine how many speakers are needed to perform it. Add one to the total number of speakers required, and ask students to come up to the front of the classroom to play both the designated roles as presented in the dialogue/speech and the mysterious extra role.
Before getting started, inform the extra student that he or she is being quiet during the speech or conversation, but will chip in with something interesting or relevant at the end. He/she could be encouraged to use “AND…” “And you know what?”, “Just to add to that…” etc. The challenge for the extra speaker is to produce something that can attach relatively naturally to the end of the existing conversation. Even if it doesn’t, the result is likely to be a comical or entertaining one!
2.5. Sorry to interrupt, but…
This is similar to 2.4 above, except in this case the extra speaker is going to interrupt and add some sort of input during the dialogue or speech. The exact time to interrupt could be allocated by the teacher (but only the interrupter is told when) or could be done ad hoc by the student responsible.
It is useful to ask students to use a variety of different interruption devices when performing this role. For example, he/she could be asked to clear his/her throat loudly, or say things like “Sorry to interrupt, but…”, “Sorry to barge in like this, but…”, “Ah, sorry guys…” or even “Excuse me, but did you know that…” This can be a fun and interesting way to show different interruption devices, which are more formal or informal, considerate or rude.
Not knowing when a person is going to interrupt creates a sense of fun suspense for both the other speakers and the class audience in general. This is great for both fun application of the model and broader speaking awareness.
2.6. Highlighting language through gap-fills
Sometimes the best way to model spoken communication is to encourage the students to interact with and think about how and why it works the way it does - right from the start. To this end, a teacher can photocopy the speaking model and white out some gaps specifically chosen to highlight particular patterns or variations in language usage.
In the example below – from Boost! Speaking, the white outs have actually already been built in to the model in the coursebook. In this instance, the idea is to showcase how small chunks (here: pronouns and certain auxiliary or model verbs) are often left out in naturally spoken informal English where the context is already clear to the speakers.
To see a larger version of this example, View this image.
This can be done with any dialogue model to showcase a variety of things in spoken English:
- How contractions work
- Specific grammatical forms
- Vocabulary collocations
- Transitions
- Tag questions
- Discourse markers
Etc.
Depending on what works at any particular time, the students could be asked to fill in the gaps as they listen to the dialogue being performed, or they could work in pairs and attempt to guess what might fill in the gaps before they see and/or hear the completed version. This allows a teacher to bring a richer array of skills and noticing to dialogues in the coursebook and helps prevent the passive way many students and their teachers utilise speaking models.
If you have any good activity ideas of your own that relate to working with spoken dialogue models, please do let us know about them in the comments section below!
All of the Supplementary Speaking Activities articles will be added to the Speaking Activities section of this blog, so if you'd like to see previous articles or want to know where to go to get the future ones, please check there first!
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