39 ESL Vocabulary Activities: For Teenagers and Adults - Jackie Bolen, Jennifer Booker Smith 2015

Partner role-plays
Games and activities for all levels

Skills: Writing/Reading/Speaking/Listening

Time Required: 20-40 minutes

Materials: Nothing

Partner role plays are an excellent way to get students practicing using new vocabulary in a real-life context. Give the students a conversation starter to get them going. For example, if you’re talking about feelings in class that day, you can use:

A: Hey ..., how are you doing?

B: I'm great, how are you?

A: I'm ... (sad, embarrassed, angry, bored, etc.). ***Anything besides, “I'm fine, thank you, and you?” is good. ***

B: Oh? What's wrong?

A: ... .

B: ... .

Another context that I often use this activity with is illness or injury. For example:

A: Hey ..., you don't look (sound) so good! What's wrong?

B: Oh yeah, I'm not good. I ... .

A: Really? ... .

B: ... .

A: ... .

One final context that I use this with is excuses. For example:

A: Hey ..., you're ... minutes late!

B: I'm really sorry. I've been/I had to ... .

A: Hmmm . . . ... .

Give the students about ten minutes to write the conversation with their partner. You can adjust the number of lines and how detailed of a starter you give to suit the ability level of your students. For lower-level students, it can be helpful to have a word bank relevant to the context on the whiteboard so that the writing portion of this activity doesn't get too long (you can also provide them with a detailed, fill-in-the-blank script). Then, the students memorize their conversation (no papers when speaking!), and do a role-play in front of their classmates if you have a small class of less than ten. Remember that you should try to maximize the amount of time students are talking. If you have a larger class, there are a few different ways to handle this. You could get pairs to come up to your desk and show you their conversation while the other students are working on something else, you could use it as a speaking test of some kind, each pair could join with one or two other groups and perform for them, or finally you could have students make a video of themselves and send you the link or upload it to YouTube.

I really like this activity because it's perfect for lower-level students who want to practice “conversation” but don't quite have the skills to do this on their own and it's also a good way to force your advanced students to use some new grammar or vocabulary that you're teaching.

Teaching Tips:

Having your students make conversations is very useful for practicing functional language and speaking sub-skills. I usually choose one or two functions to mention when I'm giving the instructions for the activity and provide a bit of coaching and language input surrounding that, depending on the level—beginners will need more help.

The functions in particular that fit well with partner conversations include agreeing, disagreeing, apologizing, and asking advice. The sub-skills that you can emphasize are things like turn-taking, initiating a conversation, speaking for an appropriate length of time, stress and intonation, responding (really?), and cohesive devices, particularly noun pronoun reference: A: I saw a movie last night. B: Which one did you see? A. I saw Iron Man. It was good.

This truly is one of the most useful things you can do in your conversation classes, especially for beginner or intermediate students so make sure you try it out at least once or twice over the course of a semester. It gives your students a chance to have a real conversation which will build a lot of confidence but they won't have the pressure of coming up with something to say on the spot. That said, it gets boring if you do this every class; I generally do it about once a month for a class that meets twice a week over the course of a semester.

Procedure:

1. Prepare a conversation starter based on what you are teaching.

2. (Optional) Pre-teach some language that students could use, if you haven't done that already in your lesson.

3. Write the conversation starter on the whiteboard, PowerPoint, or on a handout.

4. Have students complete the conversation in pairs. Then, they must prepare to speak by memorizing and adding in stress and intonation. You could give some individual help to each pair to assist them in knowing what to stress and how to do it.

5. Have students stand up and “perform” their conversation if you have a small class. In larger classes, there are a few other options (see above).

6. Reward teams for interesting conversations, good acting (no reading), and correct use of grammar/vocabulary that you were teaching that day.