Tag: speaking

Teaching the Osage Indian Murders

This post describes one of the real historical mysteries discussed in our latest book, History’s Mysteries. This book includes 40 unsolved mysteries from history. Students read a text, discuss and analyze, do research on their own, and then complete a serious of projects designed to help them figure out what they think happened and why. In the process, they use critical thinking skills, academic research and writing skills, and get caught up in a fascinating story of intrigue! Read about the Osage Indian Murders and download a free unit teaching the Osage Indian Murders to try in your classroom!

The Osage Indian Murders or The Reign of Terror

One of the America’s most devastating unsolved historical mysteries involved oil, corruption, intrigue, over 100 murders and helped give birth to the FBI. And chances are you never heard a word about it, until now!

The Osage Indian tribe, like many Native American tribes had been forced off their native land and sent to a reservation, travelling the Trail of Tears to Kansas. However in due time, the US government again wanted to force the Osage off this land so they could develop the Midwest.

Coming to Oklahoma

In 1870 the tribe decided to buy dry and rocky land in Oklahoma. Their reasoning was that no one would want this land. No one would force them off of it. Life in Oklahoma was indeed hard. So it seemed an ironic, but well-deserved, blessing when oil was discovered on Osage land in 1894. The tribe decided to give headrights, the right to own and profit off the land, to all landowners. They paid a percentage of profits from the oil to everyone living on the reservation. This helped to enrich the whole tribe.

The richest people in the US

And there was quite a bit to go around! Checks given out to each member three times a year grew from $100 to $1000 ($13,000 in today’s money) to even higher as more oil was discovered and drilled. In 1923, alone it is estimated the tribe earned $30 million. That is the equivalent of $400 million today, making the members of the tribe the richest people on Earth! Unfortunately, that kind of money can bring a lot of problems.

Among other things, America was in the middle of The Great Depression, so people were envious of the Osage (But admired the Rockefellers and Gettys and white oil barons)! Under the guise of protecting the Osage, the US Congress passed a law that each Osage (50% or more of ‘native blood’) needed a court-appointed guardian. These guardians were usually white outsiders and they had total control over the money. The looting began immediately. Dozens of guardians were charged with corruption, but settled outside of court. Millions of stolen dollars were held by the guardian system and not returned!

The Reign of Terror

Then the killing started! In short order, 18 Osage and 3 outsiders were found dead, many connected to the first victim, Anna Brown. Brown’s mother had died so ownership of her estate was in limbo! At first, authorities called the deaths accidental, but it soon became clear that they were not. Local and state officials could not solve the murders or the web of fraud surrounding them! Possible the police were in on some of the corruption themselves.

So the tribe reached out to a new federal law enforcement branch, the FBI. At the time, this agency was called the Bureau of Investigations. It had little power or prestige. Their undercover operation investigating the Osage Indian murders helped put them on the map. They uncovered a web of contracted killings designed to eliminate members of the Osage and get their money! But many murders were never solved!

Can your students pick up where the FBI left off?

Download our free unit teaching the Osage Indian Murders below on Teacher Pay Teachers and try it out in the classroom!

Why use historical mysteries to teach English?

• Real historical mysteries are popular and engaging. There’s a reason that there are so many shows about them. Students are going to be motivated to read and discuss them, maybe be the one to solve the unsolved!
• When students study history, they are discussing events, using language to talk about cause and effect, order of events, pre-existing circumstances. And they are also expressing opinions and levels of certainty, all key language
• Analyzing a real unsolved mystery teaches key critical thinking, research, and analytical skills, important for academic work or civil life.

Alphabet Publishing’s Most Popular Posts of 2021

It’s that time of year again: Time to share my most popular posts of 2021 so if you missed it, you’ll see it now! It seems like there’s a big focus on community and social-emotional learning (including teacher self-care)! I’m not sure in a year of COVID resurgences and political and social turmoil, that any of that is particularly surprising! I’m also kind of happy to see my quirky posts on a cool tech trick and on Minecraft, my hobby, are trending!

So without further ado: popular posts, bestsellers, and a series making a comeback in 2021!

Most Popular Posts

• How to Merge Data from Excel to PowerPoint: This process allows you to create flashcards or any kind of structured data in Excel (or Word) and turn each set of info into a separate slide in PowerPoint. It’s an amazing way to create Student Profiles, Flashcards, Quote of the Day Sets, Prompt of the Week Sets and more!
• Easy Minecraft Kitchen Furniture: I like Minecraft. I try to play Minecraft in my free time, but free time is limited. So I thought maybe sharing Minecraft ideas here would motivate me. And lo and behold, a Minecraft post is #2 for the year!
• An Interactive Way to Review the Syllabus: A great framework for reviewing a big important document such as a syllabus in a way that’s a bit more interactive!
• Short Plays for English Learners: These plays by Alice Savage continue to please. Each one is high-interest, features an array of colloquial language, and provides wonderful practice for prosody and pragmatics!
• Warmers for Online Classes: This post may prove to be popular next year too (Thanks, omicron!). Ways to warm up online and make the distance learning classroom a little less remote (Yes, I did just think of that). And the good news is these all work in face-to-face classrooms too!
• Classroom Community Builders: My book on useful language practice activities that also build classroom community. Go beyond breaking the ice and create a strong classroom community.

I also like to look at which books are selling well in 2021! It’s been an interesting and challenging year for everyone. So you never quite know what teachers are looking for, but we have a few books that stood out as bestsellers, and some books that are suddenly popular again!

Rising Stars

The Silly Shakespeare for Students Series is our rising star, or most improved series of books, particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I love these plays and I’m so happy to see teachers starting to use them!

Best-Sellers in 2021

Drama, self-care, and creative writing. Sounds about right for 2021, doesn’t it? We love all our books and we’re grateful to all our customers, but we’re glad you’re enjoying these books as much as we are! Check out our whole catalog for even more creative and innovative teacher-resource books and supplementary student books!

Halloween Activities for English Class

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. And it’s a great holiday to share with students. Some say it’s too scary or macabre to do Halloween activities in English class. But you can always find an aspect of the holiday that isn’t too gruesome. You can talk about trick-or-treating, costumes, or creepy animals such as spiders, bats, or owls. You can tell or write silly ghost stories, instead of scary ones. Of course, you can also go for the scary—I miss my 6th and 7th graders who were all about the gore!).

So here are some of our best-selling Halloween activities for English class, whether it be ESL or EFL. These resources are all available on Teachers Pay Teachers where you can download and print them for your whole class. However, you’ll also find links to the books the activities come from, so you can check out the whole collection!

Printable Halloween Resources

What-Would-You-Dos are a great critical thinking activity that get students talking about hypothetical situations. Kill a Spider is a nice simple one that appeals to all ages and isn’t overly scary. But it’s still got a Halloween feel because it’s about creepy-crawlies!

Get students talking about whether it’s ok to kill spiders or other annoying animals. Find the whole activity, including background story, supporting questions, and extension ideas on TpT or check out our whole collection of hypothetical situations, What Would You Do by Taylor Sapp.

What would you do if you were bitten by a zombie? Would you kill yourself before you could turn? Try to find an antidote? Maybe the zombie is really just a weird guy. This one really sets the Halloween mood, but also brings pop culture into the classroom, and even gives some insight into student character. What kind of person you are could really change what you do in a life-or-death situation, even one as fantastical as this!

Find the whole Zombie Bite activity on TpT including background story, supporting questions, and extension ideas or check out our whole collection of hypothetical situations, What Would You Do by Taylor Sapp.

Maybe your students don’t want to celebrate Halloween, or they have their own ideas for a scary holiday (or a new autumn celebration). This page from Teresa X. Nguyen‘s wonderful book gets students thinking about a new holiday of their own design.

This hand-drawn illustrated prompt has students thinking of their holiday name, purpose, activities, food and more. Then they can share it in writing, discussion, or art. So many ways to use Teresa’s amazing prompt!

Find Create a New Holiday on TpT or check out the whole collection of prompts, 60 Positive Activities for Kids

Another What Would You Do, hypothetical situation for critical thinking, Haunted Bedroom. What would your students do if there were a ghost in their house? This is one that can be as scary or as mild as you like. Perhaps the ghost is friendly, or needs your help.

Find the whole activity including background story, supporting questions, and extension ideas on Teachers Pay Teachers or check out our whole collection of hypothetical situations, What Would You Do by Taylor Sapp.

What would Halloween be without scary stories? This one from Stories Without End by Taylor Sapp is a classic. One kid is dared to go into a (supposedly) haunted house. The twist is that your students get to write the twist.

This haunted house Halloween story ends at the moment the boy decides to enter the house. What happens next? Is the house really haunted? Or is it all a hoax? Your students get to decide!

Find the whole story and activities on TpT or check out our whole collection of unfinished stories, Stories Without End by Taylor Sapp.

Tell a Scary Story or Act One Out

You can also check out some of our teacher activity books for some ideas for Halloween Activities for EFL students. Instant EFL Lesson Plans by Cristian Spiteri has a number of storytelling and roleplay activities, that you could adapt by allowing only scary stories! For example, you could do this improv storytelling activity but tell students the story is a scary Halloween tale!

Another of Cristian’s activities involves exploring a literary genre and then creating a scene in that genre. While the activity in the book focuses on fantasy and sci-fi, it could just as easily be adapted to be about horror or Halloween stories.

And while you’re at it, why not have students improvise a scene from a horror movie? Or write a Halloween script? The Drama Book is full of activities, lesson plans, and guidance to get students using theater, drama, and acting skills to practice natural communication.

What’s your go-to Halloween activity for English class? Share in the comments!

Why Accent Doesn’t Matter

I hear it from students all the time. “I need to get rid of my accent.” Or “I need sound like a real British person” There’s a whole cottage industry of people “teaching” real native accents. The problem is that accent doesn’t matter! Comprehensibility does! And don’t tell anyone, but prosody is a far larger determiner of how well understood you are than accent is. In this article, I’m going to talk about what prosody is and why it matters. But first I’m going to explain exactly why your accent doesn’t matter and deconstruct native speakerism in a few steps!

Foreigners Have Native Accents

The argument for a “real native English accent” is easy to refute. Start with the fact that a lot of those “real native accent” videos are taught by people who aren’t technically native speakers.

I was just watching a video series by a Nigerian gentleman with so many comments about how he had a perfect “native” accent. He did indeed have a mastery of RP, often considered the gold standard of proper English speech and easily heard in BBC news broadcasts. That may be for a variety of reasons. In fact, Nigerians can be considered native speakers. Kids in Nigeria often learn English at a very young age and it is a former British colony. Certainly the teacher on the video was a fluent and proficient speaker. And that’s the point! If a gentleman in Nigeria has a desirable “native” accent, then obviously native means more than just British or American—something most students would never admit to.

Native Speakers Don’t Always Have Native Accents

The funny thing is that many people all over the world learn English from birth and thus are native speakers. That includes people born in India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and so on. Yet somehow, native speaker accent doesn’t include English spoken in Mumbai! I’ve never had anyone ask to speak more like a Canadian or a Texan or even a New Englander (but Pepperidge Farm remembers)! Native doesn’t mean West Country England, Scotland, or Ireland. Nor Australia. So native speakers aren’t even native speakers. (more…)

Those Students: Deictic Expressions and Real-World Communication Skills

I’ve been doing a lot of presentations on pragmatics recently and thinking about how to teach students real-world communication skills in English. The problem is that in the classroom we often communicate at a very literal and direct level. Outside the classroom, we don’t! We leave things unsaid, assume knowledge on the part of the listener, even exaggerate or outright lie! We also use idiomatic language, fixed expressions, and deictic expressions, language that take their meaning from context.

And maybe the hardest group of deictic expression is “insider expressions” when we talk to people. These are expressions that people in a particular group will understand, even though outsiders might not. You probably have slang that only your family uses, inside jokes that refer to events only your friends experience, even technical terms that are used only at your company. These kinds of expressions are helpful to communicate more quickly. They also bond the group together because if you understand them, you’re part of the group! And of course often these expressions are jokes or refer to funny incidents. In college, we used to say “Do you like stuff?” when someone said something awkward, referring to a time a guy actually asked that question to a girl he liked!

But often in our teaching materials, dialogues are written to be very clear. When speakers discuss a topic, they introduce it fully and give all needed information. So students may be unprepared for a dialogue like this:

We don’t know what “those students” means exactly. But we can tell a few things from the dialogue:

• “Those students” are bad students-note the negative reaction of the second teacher, “Oh no!”
• “Those students” probably aren’t too bad. The first teacher is laughing suggesting amusement, not concern.
• The laughter also tells us that the teachers probably get along well. In these situations, that kind of amusement is often a bit teasing, and you don’t tease casual acquaintances.
• We also know most teachers have behaviors they don’t appreciate, but it will vary from teacher to teacher and school to school! They might be students who are always late or who dominate the class discussion or who never do their homework.
• And of course, we know that teachers often complain about students as a way of letting off steam so the use of a term “those students” may be more about bonding and laughing than about actually disparaging students!

So there’s a lot going on here beyond the words on the page. I’m sure if we heard this conversation, there’d be a lot going on with intonation, body language, and facial expressions too. And in fact, we could change one word and turn “those students” from bad to good. If the second teacher said, “Oh yeah!”, we’d know they were talking about a student who is hard-working or insightful or a quick learner or is kind and helpful! The dialogue that follows would probably be all about praising Adam and sharing all the great things he does in class!

Deictic Expressions Activities

So how do we help students learn how to deal with deictic expressions, particularly insider expressions? By exposing them to input that is not always direct and literal. Here’s one way:

1. Take a script of a play, movie, or TV show and find a scene with a few of these expressions.
2. Have students underline them and figure out as much as they can about the meaning.
3. Watch the scene, if possible, and have them use body language and intonation cues to supplement their understanding.
4. Then give them the full context and have them discuss how their understand was correct or incorrect.

Because the meaning of deictic expressions by definition relies on context, students can’t just memorize them. However, they can build their analytical skills and learn to read the context, and use other clues to make a good assumption. And that’s what we’re doing in real-world communication half the time any way!

You can also check out all our drama resources and activities for ELT, including theater games, a guide to reader’s theater, short plays, and books of drama activities! Get dramatic in the classroom in a good way!

How to do Social-Emotional Learning Prompts for ESL

Sometimes the best classroom activities come out of the simplest things. Case in point, these Social-Emotional Learning prompts for ESL students created by Teresa X. Nguyen and illustrated by Tyler Hoang and Nathaniel Cayanan. Each worksheet has a written prompt and an original hand-drawn illustration. It’s simple enough but designed to work for students at any level. It’s a particularly powerful tool, as there are plenty of social-emotional learning activities and prompts for the mainstream classroom.

But what’s unique about these worksheets is that they’re the only social-emotional learning prompts for ESL students and the ESL classroom! Because they’re so simple and there’s so much space on the page, students can respond by drawing, writing, jotting down words and notes, or discussing. You can even scaffold, moving from sketches and single words all the way to a longer piece of writing.

Because these positive activity prompts  are so much fun, I couldn’t sharing some of my own ideas for filling them out. I’ve also included some ways to implement them in the classroom! Links to the worksheets on Teachers Pay Teachers are in the captions or check out all our printable, downloadable, or shareable Positive Activities.

I’ll start with my favorite!

New Emotions or Emojis

Students draw expressions to represent new feelings or attitudes and then share their creations with the class. They can get other students to guess their emotions from the drawings or share one emoji they want, or even an emotion they think needs a name! Like that feeling when you’re physically tired but emotionally not ready for bed!

Here’s a list of a few ways students can respond to the Social Emotional Learning prompts, depending on their language level and the logistics of the class. I’ve put the activities in roughly order of complexity. However, what works for your classroom and what is easier or harder for your students may also vary! You can even scaffold the activities and have students start anywhere on the list, then work their way up. Go from a sketch to a short writing in a few simple moves!

1. Sketch an response.
2. Label the drawing with key words.
3. Discuss your response with a partner.
4. Write short phrases or sentences as a response.
5. Brainstorm ideas with a partner or in a group.
6. Outline a longer response, using a graphic organizer or writing frame.
7. Discuss the prompt in detail with a partner.
8. Write a paragraph or series of paragraphs.
9. Share written answers and provide peer feedback

#Thankful Prompt

I love this thankful prompt because it really tells you what your students value in others. What do they love about the people in their lives? They may want to name these people, but they don’t have to. This is a great discussion prompt as students can share about one particular person in their lives.

A Selfie

This is a fun getting-to-know-you activity that can be done in a lot of different ways. Students can draw themselves realistically or how they want to appear. They can label the drawing with facts about themselves, the clothes they like to wear, how they feel about their appearance (like their favorite part of themselves). They can draw themselves doing something they love or wearing their favorite clothes or sitting in their favorite place. What do they want to share about themselves? Extend this activity by making a gallery of classmates for everyone to get to know everyone else. Have them do one at the beginning of the term and at the end so they can compare their portraits.

My Robot Social-Emotional ESL Prompt

This prompt is a lot of fun for young learners. They’re probably making their own robots anyway and the activity can give them a lot of vocabulary. Students can learn words for describing machines and electronics including button, gear, switch, click, and more! They can also learn words for the functions their robot performs.

They could focus on a problem and have their robot be a solution to that problem, which helps build vocabulary in a particular area. Or just have them go crazy designing the coolest robot they can think of and labelling all the features. Then they can share with a partner or with the whole class.

You may ask how to use this as a social-emotional learning prompt specifically. Students can design robots to help with social or emotional life issues-a companion robot, a therapist bot, a tool to help with special needs. Your students’ imagination is the limit.

My Rhyming Poem: Writing Prompt for SEL 

There are a lot of ways to get students writing short rhyming poems. They can read and copy rhyming poems, including formulaic ones such as limericks or “Roses are red, violets are blue” poems. They can sing rhyming songs and copy the structure. You can even have them imitate a picture book. Let them enjoy flipping through a rhyming dictionary for ideas.

Looking for a whole book of these? Check out the paperback of 60 Positive Activities for Kids, for sale wherever books are sold! We also have them in slide format to make them easy to share in-person or online!

And feel free to share your ideas for using these wonderful creations in the classroom!

Teaching Pragmatics with Memes

I recently discovered these wonderful communication-fail memes from PunHubOnline! Beyond being peak comedy for language lovers, these memes highlight a really important point: communication happens far beyond grammar and vocabulary. Pragmatics, the hidden rules that determine how we communicate with each other, is a huge factor in determining how we communicate. These memes are funny because they break those rules of pragmatics. So there’s nothing more natural than teaching pragmatics with memes.

What is Pragmatics and Why Should We Teach It?

Pragmatics is how we take into account a context and situation when communicating. Put simply, we speak very differently to our parents than we do to our friends, or when we are fighting with someone vs. when we are having a good time. I’ve written more about pragmatics and why it’s important here.

Looking at the meme above, the flight attendant is asking “Would you like coffee or tea?” Now she’s dropped the first part of the question. This might be rude in other contexts, but we know that flight attendants are busy so they can shorten the question, and we’re busy too!

And there a variety of clues that make the meaning of the utterance clear:

1. Flight attendants often offer people food and drink.
2. The flight attendant is holding out a Thermos.
3. People hold things out and show them to you when offering things.
4. They also adopt a questioning tone and may raise their eyebrows, smile, or in other ways look friendly and opening.
5. Many people enjoy a coffee or tea after a meal.

There is no reason why a flight attendant would quiz you on the contents of a container! And yet in some contexts, the question “Coffee or tea?” might mean “Guess which one this is.” Maybe it’s a classroom and the teacher is playing a guessing game to review vocabulary, or maybe your friend has discovered a kind of tea that tastes just like coffee and he’s betting you can’t tell the difference.

The point is: the sentence isn’t wrong. The grammar and vocabulary are correct. But the context IS wrong and that’s where the communication fail happened!

Deictic Expressions

Here’s another example meme, one of my favorites. A man tells the hotel receptionist, “I’ve forgotten what room I’m in.”

The receptionist answers, “It’s called the Lobby!” The joke here is based on the misunderstanding of the designation, “room I’m in”. In a hotel “the room you are in” refers to your hotel room, the place you are sleeping. If we meant the room we are currently in, we’d say “this room”.

Also, there are very few reasons WHY we’d ask what the lobby was called. It doesn’t really matter if we call it a hotel lobby or reception or that big room near the door!

On the other hand, it’s plausible a guest might forget their room number and need to be reminded. So again, context is important and so is purpose. In the real world, we ask questions for a reason!

Another interesting thing is that the man’s statement is really a question. He’s not informing the woman he forgot his room number just for fun. He wants her to tell him the number.

We ask indirect questions all the time. We also ask rhetorical questions that are really statements! Rhetorical devices and their impact are a huge part of communication, but rarely explicitly taught!

Ideas for Teaching Pragmatics with Memes

There are a lot of things you can do with these memes in the classroom. I’ve attached a few above from https://www.eatliver.com but the PunHub Instagram account is the best place to get them-do check them for classroom appropriateness and language level though. You can share them with students and ask them to analyze them with the following questions:

1. What is the context and what expectations do people have in these contexts?
2. What hidden assumptions is the first speaker making?
3. How does the second speaker break that assumption?
4. Is the second speaker making any assumptions?
5. What might a real conversation look like?
6. What rules of social communication can we derive from the misunderstanding?

Students can also write their own memes. This might appear difficult but they probably have a miscommunication story of their own to share. I remember being asked how I’d rate a film once. For some reason, I though the person meant content ratings, so I said, “PG-13”! There may be a colloquialism in English that has just never made sense to them, an expression that has always stuck out for them because the literal meaning is so far off the intended meaning, or even something a foreigner in their own country said wrongly once!

Other Pragmatics Lesson Ideas

You can also help raise students’ awareness of pragmatics through short microsketches. Any dialogue that has a clear purpose can work. We have a lesson plan up on Teachers Pay Teachers, The Favor Microsketch: Learning Pragmatics Through Drama , that helps students learn about the language of asking for a favor, for example.

Feel free to browse all our Drama Resources on Teachers Pay Teachers for more help teaching spoken communication and pragmatics. We also have more drama resources and materials here.

Do you have other suggestions for teaching pragmatics with memes or other teaching ideas?

What does “I was, like…” mean?

In the spring, I had the great pleasure of seeing a bit of David Crystal talk at the 2020 Digital Hay Festival. (By the way, if anyone is looking to for a great Christmas present, his latest book looks amazing!) and I was rather pleased to hear him, as a well-known and respected linguist, defend teenspeak/Valley Girl with words such as “like”.

In fact, he did a wonderful example of “I was, like,” and do a shocked face. It reminded me of the first 5 seconds of this clip reminded me of the first 10 seconds of this clip from Over the Hedge. This is meant to be a parody of a teenage girl circa 2005, but it actually makes perfect sense to me, and apparently Professor Crystal agrees!

So, what does “I was, like…” mean?

We know that when we are listening to someone, really listening, we are paying attention to their words, but we’re paying attention to so much more. We’re listening to their tone to determine how they feel about what they are saying! We’re watching their body language for the same reason. Speakers also use their tone and gestures to keep the audience engaged and sometimes we reference a movie or TV show by imitating a character. Or we even adopt the pose as we speak of a well-known stereotype in our culture: the scolding parent, the arrogant puffed up boss, a crazy person, someone who is exhausted!

In fact, it can be difficult or time-consuming to describe everything we think and feel and say in a situation. So sometimes, the body language or facial expression or pose is the best way to communicate effectively. And sometimes it’s the only way!

The word SAID doesn’t fully encapsulate this idea. So, we have this wonderful word LIKE which does. “I was, like” really means

Don’t believe me. Think about these popular gifs below. Think of how easy it is to understand what these people are thinking or feeling. And think about how popular it is to use a gif or meme like this to express an idea. Actually, these kinds of memes are just high-tech ways to say, “I was all, like…”

Using Like in Lessons

Some will say we shouldn’t be teaching like and other forms of informal speech in class. However, students certainly should be able to understand what LIKE means when they hear it. And letting students play with this expression can help them learn to use gesture and facial expression more effectively. And you can use engaging content like GIFS and memes!

Here’s a few things activity ideas for teaching what like means. Try them out, you know. It could be like, AMAZING!!!!!

• Students come up with scenarios that might generate strong emotional reactions. It might be a whole situation or even just something someone could say to them. Students take turns saying “I was, like…” and then giving an expression. Other students guess the meaning and discuss how they might react in the same situation.
• Have students pick a gif that uses a facial expression. They can imitate it in front of the class, introducing it with “I was, like…” The class has to guess the meaning. Extend by discussing the situation in which someone would make that expression
  Note that the expressions and gestures gifs are often exaggerated so you may want to follow-up by demonstrating a more common form.
• Show the clip of Heather from above. Have students see if they can have a whole conversation in gesture, using expressions such as “I was, like…” or “You’re totally being…”
• Have students find a video where a character uses “like”. Have them share it and talk about what the character means.

Share your ideas for activities below

And if you’re looking for more drama-based lessons and activities that use body language, tone, and gesture, check out our resources for drama activities.

Embodied Mind: The Dancer and Dance and Grammar

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Yeats famously wrote. And in the dance of human communication, the body plays a role. Language is more than word choice or grammar, and even more than prosody. Gesture, body language, facial expression are all tools of meaning-making. This is why study of the embodied mind, how the mind and body are not separate, has been informative for linguistics and education. Alice and Colin, authors of the forthcoming 60 Kinesthetic Grammar Activities, have written about ways to use the body in teaching grammar:

Looking for more?

Browse all our free resources for doing drama in the classroom at Plays and Drama Resources for Students. 

Set Your Roleplay to Music

Looking for a way to make your roleplays more engaging and also help students explore communication tools more effectively? Try music.

We all know the power of music to set a mood. Television shows and movies exploit this all the time. You probably know the famous theme from the film Jaws: Duh-duh…duh-duh…duh-duh,duh-duh,duh-duh-duh! It builds suspense even when nothing particularly frightening is happening on screen. The music alone tells you something bad is about to happen and evokes a mood that makes the appearance of a deadly shark even more terrifying!

Soundtrack to Life

Or think of a man and woman drinking tea or coffee at a café. The man fumbles around awkwardly, makes some dumb jokes about his clumsiness, and ends up making a huge mess. She stares at him inscrutably. But the swelling piano and violin music sets a romantic mood. You are sure her look is affectionate! Her next words will be consoling or maybe an unexpected compliment.

Now imagine the soundtrack was Yakety Sax, made famous by Benny Hill. Suddenly this is a slapstick comedy scene. The man drops his wallet, picks it up only to trip over his own feet! Her stare shows how pathetic he is. She will probably sigh next. Or whack him over the head and storm out.

Maybe the music is ominous: slow long cello notes. Perhaps the woman is a serial killer and she’s decided this loser is too sad to live. She will invite him to come home with her. He will be surprised, but accept before she changes her mind!

So music has a lot of power. It can set a mood. It can evoke a context (in a movie, this would be the genre but in real-life the genre might better be seen as the context ). It can also indicate the characters’ intentions. And all these elements have an effect on the language we use. Our body language, tone, choice of topic, and even the words and grammar we choose to express ourselves with, are determined in part by our intentions, mood, and the context. A family attending a birthday party today will speak and act very differently during a family emergency.

You can exploit this in the classroom through a very simple activity:

Activity: Set your roleplay to music

Find a short, simple roleplay. Your textbook probably has a few. Look for the sample dialogues about buying a ticket, checking into a hotel, or buying something at a store. Alternatively, it could be a common place situation, like two people arguing over who does a chore or friends making plans.

(more…)