Paper conversations

Learners have the conversations with their classmates but instead of speaking, they write the conversation on a shared sheet of paper.

While the students take part in this small talk, the teacher can make improvements more easily than when students are actually speaking.

Rewriting dialogues

Asking learners to rewrite, improve or modify written dialogues.

- Changing the register

- Making it more interactive (incorporating comments)

- Including positive appraisal language

- Adding pause fillers and false starts

- Extend the length of the turns

- Incorporating discourse markers: so, well, right, oh

Dialogues

Chunks on cards– learners work in pairs to have a dialogue, and each has a set of cards with useful expressions on them, such as by the way, speaking of which etc. The idea is to include as many of these features into their conversation as possible adding the card to a discard pile each time it is used. This can be turned into a game – the first person to discard all their cards is the winner.

Ordering a jumbled dialogue

Flow diagram conversations

Learners, in pairs, perform the dialogue, following the route trough the different functions selecting from memory appropriate expressions fro the different speech acts.

Conversation tennis

A: What did you do yesterday?

B: I worked all day. Then I went to the gym.

A: Did you?

B: What did you do?

Set the learners the task of having a conversation in which they try to “bat” the conversational ball back and forth as much as possible without letting it drop.

It is a good warm-up exerciseat the beginning of every lesson.

Disappearing dialogue The text of the dialogue is written on the board, learners practice reading it aloud in pairs and then the teacher starts removing sections of it. First these could be single words, then the whole lines could be removed. Dialogue building

The dialogue is not presented to the learners but elicited from them line by line.

1. Establishing the situation, the context and the purpose (at the hotel)
2. The teacher starts to elicit the conversation.
The ideas for the 1-st, 2-d and 3-d line of the conversation.

3. The complete dialogue is built and drilled.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 867