Your ultimate classroom goal should be to use everything the students have learnt in the lesson to be able to create a monologue or dialogue as your main and final activity.
Now, a monologue does not mean a student stands in the front of the class and recites a Shakespearean speech. I always found monologues are a great way to describe: this could mean describing people, describing oneself or describing your topic material. Remember to make sure all your other students are doing something in the meantime and not just sitting and waiting for their turn.
Let’s say you’re teaching animals, a great way to incorporate a monologue is by playing bingo. While one student comes up to the front and describes an animal (this is your monologue!), the others have to listen and decide which animal is being described so that if they have it, they can tick it off getting closer to bingo (in this way you not only have one student doing a monologue, the other students are participating in a listening activity).
And that´s your monologue, easy right?
Moving on to dialogues, new teachers can once again believe dialogues have to be something boring as in two students standing in front of the class reciting A and B sentences from the whiteboard. Your thinking should be to make the class entertaining, useful and relative to life itself; thus as a consequence, your students learn. Always try to think: “How can I make a dialogue that is relatable to the real world; that is fun and engaging?”
Let’s say your topic of the class is food. This is an example of what most new teachers would consider a satisfactory dialogue:
A – What’s your favourite food?
B – My favourite food is……..
What’s your favourite food?
A – My favourite food is ……., see you later.
Your students will find this dull and pointless. The two students doing the dialogue won’t be interested, while the other children in the classroom won’t be paying attention or learning anything.
Instead, think food…what dialogue can I do that will be fun and relatable to the real world? What could this scenario be? Going to a restaurant.
Now you have the most important part ready – the scenario.
The next part is to set the scene – create a restaurant in the class by putting on some restaurant music in the background or if you have a student who can play an instrument get them to play their instrument to create a restaurant atmosphere. Get a background picture on the whiteboard of a restaurant, create a menu, and bring in cutlery, crockery, food and drinks. Make it as fun and as realistic as possible.
During the dialogue, get one student to be the waiter and one to be the customer; get some of the students to play as extras in the restaurant. Set the mood, make the students excited to participate in the dialogue. Whilst the two or three students are acting out a restaurant scene, get the others to listen and watch; at the end of the dialogue they can judge them on their performance by awarding points out of 10.
Some may say it´s easy to create a fun dialogue if the topic is food, but what about grammar. How can one create a fun dialogue when practising a grammar point? Let´s say you are teaching the modal verb ‘can’, getting students to express ability such as:
I can …….
He can …..
I can’t …..
She can’t ……..
Most inexperienced teachers would get a student or two to come up to the front of the class and ask them to tell each other what they can or can’t do – this is boring and pointless.
Remember step one? Set an exciting scene, create a scenario for them in order to be excited about coming up the front.
One good example of creating a fun scenario to play out a dialogue using the sentences I can, he can; is to create a rap battle. Show your students an example of what a rap battle is, such as a YouTube clip, so that they understand what you want from them. Get them to write their rap speech beforehand, don´t ask them to try to improvise like real rappers or you will be in the class for the rest of your life (depending on their level, give them a template to fill, otherwise they may spend the entire class writing their speech and then you have no time to do the rap battle). A sample structure of a rap battle using the modal verb can, could be:
I can …, but he can´t ……….. I can …, but he can´t.
Next, create the scene! Turn the lights down, get the students making cool hip-hop dance moves and put on some rap instrumental music. I always put on an instrumental version of Dr Dre’s album 2001. Choose names from a bag and get those students to battle each other. Meanwhile, the other students listen and at the end, they judge who won the round.
Hopefully, you can now see that monologues and dialogues don’t have to be tedious or boring but are a great opportunity to experiment and have fun using English in real-life situations. When preparing a mono/dialogue, if you follow the below checklist, it will be a guaranteed success in the classroom.
- Create a real life scenario e.g.
- food = market
- animals = farm/auction
- hobbies = speed dating
- present continuous = sports commentary
- Set the scene
- the more effort you put into making the scene, the more effort your students will put in
- Get everyone involved
- even if only two people are speaking make sure the other students have a reason to listen e.g. they are judging
Below are a few examples of other games and activities that help trick students into making speeches or practising dialogues whilst having lots of fun in the process:
Ultimate Fridge /foods/
Students draw a fridge filled with their favourite foods, they must also write how much they think their fridge would cost. Give them a time limit of 10 minutes to complete their drawing. They then show and tell the class about their fridge. The other students must listen so that they can guess how much the fridge costs. The student who guesses the closest to the actual price gets a point.
Uhm Game /fluency, accuracy/
One by one, students are timed as they talk about a certain subject for as long as they can without pausing or saying ‘Uhm’, as soon as they do one of these forbidden actions, the timer stops and they are out. The student who manages to speak for the longest wins.
Airport Security /I have, classroom objects/
Students act out an airport security scenario. Two students come up to the front of the class, one student is a security guard and the other is a passenger. The passenger comes up to the security guard with their school bag and must take all their items out of the school bag, present them to the security guard and tell the guard what they have in their bag e.g. I have a pencil, I have two notebooks etc. After, the security guard can pat the student down, checking to see if they have anything in their pockets. If they have something in their pockets, the passenger must explain what they have. Afterwards, the passenger can become the security guard and the next student becomes the passenger. This a great game for learning classroom objects and for practising the ‘to have’ verb.
Weather Forecast /weather, present continuous/
Draw, on the whiteboard, an outline map of the country you are teaching in with a few main cities pointed out on the map. One by one, a student comes up to the map and presents a (improvised or pre-prepared depending on their level) weather forecast speech including the temperature, clothes one should wear in this temperature and some activities one can do (It´s always important to find ways of getting students to review topics they have done in previous classes otherwise they will forget what they have learnt a month ago, a year ago and will never actually learn English). Meanwhile, the other students quickly draw the map on the whiteboard and must listen to the weather forecast and draw the type of weather they hear and write the clothes and actions mentioned. If their drawings are accurate, they receive a point.
Try to make it more exciting and real by dimming the lights and getting a student to be the ‘cameraman’ by giving him a phone and allowing them to video the forecast. After each person has finished their weather report, let them be the cameraman, this gives a little more motivation for the student to do the speech.
Bomb Squad /accuracy/
This game can be played with any subject, all the students need to do is prepare a speech on their given subject.
Draw a TNT style bomb on the whiteboard with five or six separate lines in a row coming out of the bomb – this is the fuse. Set a time limit of anything from one to five minutes depending on the level of your class and how many students you have. As a student is doing their speech, the class must listen for any mistakes he or she makes. If a student hears a mistake they must yell stop and tell us what mistake the student made. If it is a genuine mistake, erase one line from the fuse and give a point to the student who heard the mistake, if however, the student accusing is wrong, that student loses a point. If all five or six lines are erased before the speaking student finishes their speech, the bomb explodes and that student must pay the penalty fee. If the student can finish their speech without the bomb exploding, they get a point.
Trial /accuracy/
This game can be played with any subject, all the students need to do is prepare a speech on their given subject.
One by one a student comes up to the front of the class and gives a speech, make sure the speeches are given a time limit suitable to their ability. Meanwhile, the other students must listen carefully and write any mistakes they hear including grammar, syntax, pronunciation and coherence. Then the student that gave the speech sits in front of the class and the other students begin to accuse that student of whatever mistakes they heard him or her say. You, the teacher, are the judge and must listen to the students’ accusations and judge whether they are false or true. If an accusation is false, the judge takes a point away from the student who made the accusation. If the student gives a true accusation, the student who gave the speech losses a point whilst the student who made the accusation gains a point. However, if the student who made the mistake can explain what is wrong and how to correct their mistake, they are pardoned and their point is returned to them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Game /discipline/
This is a great activity to defuse a problematic situation in the class but also helps students to bond more with each other and learn how to solve each other’s problems.
If a student does something majorly wrong during the lesson and you didn’t see what happened e.g. if a student pushes another student or bullies another student etc., Ask both students to write their opinion of what happened and then read them to the class. The other students listen as they are the jury and must decide who the guilty party is and what their punishment should be.
How many can you name? /vocab, this, that, these, those/
A student has one minute to name as many things that they can see in the classroom using correct this, that, these and those sentences. The other students must listen and keep track of how many objects the student has said, the students who have kept track accurately gain a point. The winner is the student who has named as many objects as they can.
This activity doesn’t have to be limited to classroom objects but to any subject. If, for instance, you are teaching animals; then you can show your students a picture with many different animals and they have one minute to name all the animals they can see etc.
How long can you go? /describing/
Present students with a picture (that focuses on the subject being taught or reviewed). One by one, students are timed as they describe the picture for as long as they can until another student hears that they have made a mistake. The winner is the student who managed to speak for the longest without making a mistake.
