5 Give learners sufficient time to get into role. Allow them time to make
sense of the briefings and to tune in to the role that they are going to play.
Give them time to think of ideas of their own that they will bring to their
role play.
6 Legitimize acting. Encourage learners to bring some colour to the
characters that they are going to play out. Distancing the characters from
their real selves often helps learners to be more confident and relaxed in role
play situations.
7 Think of real situations that learners can role play. These could include
making a complaint to a shop manager, asking a noisy neighbour to be more
considerate, and so on. Try to tap into situations where learners will have
feelings of their own that they can act out.
8 Get learners to extrapolate from a video extract. For example, show a few
minutes of a play or soap opera, which learners are familiar with, where
learners have already been assigned roles of the characters involved. Stop
the video at a suitable point, and ask groups of learners to fill out the next
few minutes of the story for themselves. You may then find it useful to
continue the video, so that learners can compare their versions with ‘what
actually happened’.
9 Allow time for learners to get out of role. It is important for learners to
have time to look back at what happened in the role play, and to discuss what
they learnt about communication and language. Get them to work out what
they might have done differently, in the light of experience, if they were to
tackle the same role play scenario for a second time.
10 Get learners to devise their own role play scenarios. They could then
exchange these between groups, or you could use the best of them with a
future group of learners. Composing the briefing details, and making sure
that they are clear and unambiguous, is in itself a challenging and valuable
activity.27 Using the news
One way or another, the news is an important component of most people’s lives.
English language news, both live and print-based, is easily available in many
countries and provides a wide ranging agenda for language development and
communication skills practice. The following suggestions may help you to use
‘the news’ as a productive arena for your learners.
1 Show the class a video of a five minutes news bulletin. Then ask learners
individually or in groups to write a set of headlines for a newspaper, based
on the main points they have picked up from the bulletin. Don’t worry if
they can’t follow typical headline ‘style’—the important thing is for them to
try to capture the essence of a news story in a few words.LANGUAGE WORK IN THE CLASSROOM 49