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Setting up role plays
Role plays can be a very good way for students to develop fluency by forgetting themselves and concentrating on the task in hand. They provide the opportunity for extended interaction rather than just a 2-line exchange. However, they do need careful setting up and staging. If your students haven’t done any role plays before or aren’t used to doing them, start gently and don’t launch into a really challenging activity immediately.
You can easily turn ordinary conversation practice into a mini role play. Ask students who are supposed to be on the phone to sit back to back so that they can’t see each other’s faces. Ask students who are having a conversation in a shop to stand up and exchange money, etc.
Give students time to get into their characters. Tell them to think about the meaning and the situation. Encourage them to use facial expression and pronunciation (stress and intonation) to express emotion, e.g. politeness, rudeness, anger, irritation, excitement, etc.Use these guidelines for successful role plays:
Before class, think what language and vocabulary students will need to do the role play successfully and make a list.
Ask lead-in questions to engage students’ interest in the situation and to set the context of the role play. Never go into role plays “cold”.
Build up the atmosphere and encourage the suspension of disbelief by using props available in the classroom or by bringing them in, e.g. wine glasses, knives, forks, spoons and plates for a restaurant role play.
Explain the task clearly. Say who the students are and what they have to do. Get them to think about the outcome by asking What happens in the end? How does the conversation/role play end?
Assign roles or ask students to choose who they want to be. Ask a few quick questions to check that everyone is clear about the activity, e.g. Who are you? Who’s your husband/wife?
Pre-teach or check students know the language and vocabulary that you listed before class. If it’s a complicated role play, consider giving students prompt sheets with key vocabulary/questions for their characters.
Students who are playing the same character can prepare together in pairs or small groups, e.g. “husbands” together and “wives” together. They can then help each other with ideas and have extra speaking practice. Monitor this stage carefully and help with ideas and language. If you feel your class needs more support in the way of ideas, make cards for each character, e.g. You’re the wife. You and your husband both work. Your husband spends a lot of money on clothes, going out to restaurants with colleagues etc. He never spends any money on you or your home. How do you feel about this? Do you ever have rows about it? What happens in the rows? Students then pair up for the actual role play, e.g. a “husband” with a “wife”.
Before students act out their role plays, encourage them not to stick too rigidly to the materials they have prepared. They should not read out their notes! If something interesting or funny comes up, they should react to it naturally and ask questions about it, e.g. Oh, really?
Whether or not everyone acts out their role play in front of the whole class will depend on the size of your class and the time available. If you have a big class, you could ask groups to rehearse acting out their role plays to each other before they face the class. When students act out their role play to the class, make sure the class listens. Give students questions to answer as they watch, e.g. What was the man complaining about? Was he successful in the end? Or give students a task, e.g. the class is the audience for a TV interview and can applaud, heckle, etc.
Don’t interrupt while students are acting out their role plays. If they’ve done their preparation thoroughly, it should go smoothly.
When you feedback, highlight the good things as well as the errors. Where possible, avoid making students self-conscious. You could make a note of the grammatical errors you hear during the role play and deal with these in a subsequent lesson. Your immediate feedback can then be about the positive aspects of the language, the students’ ideas, fluency, stress and intonation, facial expressions etc. The aim is to boost students’ confidence so that they will be keen to do more role plays in the future.
This extract is taken from Wavelength Pre-intermediate Teacher’s Book
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