I picked this up from one of my colleagues at UCD (sorry, I don’t remember who) and have often used these “scenarios” with different activities. In this activity, I have had advanced students change the stress in the sentence to change the meaning of the dialogue – asking them to perform the skit twice. In my lower levels, I may simply have students write out a skit and then the class tries to guess the situation.
This is how I have done it in class:
- Introduce activity by reminding students that in English you have to give stress to certain words to deliver certain meanings.
- Model a sentence like…..You want me to give you money…throwing emphasis first on MONEY? and then GIVE? and YOU? etc..
- Use this easy-to-memorize dialog ( write it on the board):
A: Hi, how are you?
B: Fine, thank you. And you?
A: Just great. What have you been doing lately?
B: Oh, not much. But I’ve been keeping busy.
A: Well…it’s been good to see you.
B: Yes, it has…well, bye!
A: Goodbye. - Give each pair the situations to practice.
- Call each pair up and have them perform a randomly chosen dialogue card. After each skit, the class tries to guess the situation.
If it’s not clear what’s happened in the skit, ask: “How does Shirley feel towards Joanna” in this skit? Encourage students to suggest additional things they could do to show more meaning, emotion, etc.
ESL Instructor