Tag: speaking

Get Students Writing and Talking!

As more and more teachers are turning to online teaching and distance learning for the forseeable future, and students may be considering self-study options, I’d like to introduce our free prompt generating tool, English Prompts, with three different kinds of prompts: creative writing, speaking, and role-plays.

The first, Stories Without End, generates a random short story prompt that ends on a cliff-hanger. The genres vary from horror to comedy to sci-fi to realistic fiction, so there’s a broad range of topics. Don’t like the story? Click “New Story”! Here are some ideas to use it with students:

• Have students work as a group to brainstorm story ending ideas, then write a joint story.
• As a class, come up with a list of 5-10 questions they think the story ending should address. Then students can individually pick 2-3 questions to guide their story ending.
• Students can also generate and answer questions as a group.
• Have students each write an ending, then share them anonymously. Students read the other endings and vote on the best one.
• Have students write another paragraph and then swap papers. They then write another paragraph that follows from what the previous student wrote. The second student can end the story or students can swap again and keep adding paragraphs till they reach a logical conclusion.
• Got lower level students? They can read or tell their story idea rather than writing it. You can even have them draw a picture or storyboard their idea, then label or write an outline, and then tell it.

Next, What Would You Do? prompts are a collection of hypothetical situations that students answer by telling what they would do in those situations. Some are realistic, some are ridiculous, and some are somewhere in-between. Get a new random situation by clicking “There are a lot of ways to use this flexible resource:

• Think of contextual questions that might change students’ answers. Would you return a stolen wallet full of cash? What if you were homeless and needed the money? What if you saw the person who dropped it?
• Or have students think of contexts where they would do different actions.
• Have a debate where students argue the pluses and minuses of different situations.
• Have students use them as story prompts to write a short story highlighting the situation and their chosen response.
• Ask students to predict what their classmates would do in different situations, then do a survey.
• Have students interview friends or family members or put a poll online and then tally up the results and report on what they learned.
• Get students to come up with their own WWYD?s.
• Watch the show What Would You Do? on ABC (episodes can be found on Youtube) and get them to predict what people would do or discuss how people did react and why.

Looking to do some acting? Start a Scene is an improv or role-play prompt generator. Click “New Line” and get a first line of a dramatic scene. Students can use that to improvise or write a conversation or situation. To make it even more useful, you can also click on the “New Emotion” button and get an emotion to say the line with. This helps draw students’ attention to the way that we use our voices and bodies to show feeling or attitude. It also helps students think about pragmatics. We speak differently to angry people than happy people. If someone says something ironically, we react in a whole other way!Use these prompts to:

• Generate an improv or role-play, written or spoken.
• Ask students to practice saying a line with an emotion while others guess and/or discuss how well the actor did.
• Try the same line with different emotions and talk about how the meaning changes with the attitude.
• Describe the situation. Who is speaking? To whom? Where are they? What do they want?
• Assign inappropriate emotions to lines. Have someone say, “I love you” as if they have the giggles, for example!

Hope you enjoy this tool and we’re always open to hearing what kinds of new features you’d like to see! You can also

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

Kinesthetic Grammar Activities: Getting Grammar on the Move!

We’re thrilled to be publishing a book on Kinesthetic Grammar Activities from Alice Savage and Colin Ward. Kinesthetic grammar is a great way to practice language dynamically. The benefits are many:

• Vary the pace of the classroom
• Help teach nonverbal language and gesture in communication
• Activate embodied mind and improve the memorability of target grammar
• Build classroom community!

I’ve included an excerpt from Alice and Colin’s wonderful blog post. I highly recommend checking out the full post, which includes some example activities. Then come back here and check out the book, 60 Kinesthetic Activities!

We often talk about “grammar on the move.”  The reality is that grammar instruction itself can also be moving.   When students are asked to get out of their seats or point to something or walk around the room, they are engaged.  There is laughter and fun.  It feels like a game.   Sometimes chaos ensues, which can be great, and learning always takes place.

Kinesthetic Grammar is the idea that language can be practiced and better remembered when tied to physical movement.  A movement of the hand might indicate a change in tense. A stomping of the foot could imply a “run-on.”  The physical activity serves as a cognitive hook, something to help students remember what it is they’re learning.  Sometimes the movement even mimics the meaning of the grammar.

Below are a few examples of ways to use kinesthetic techniques to teach grammar, all of which can be modified to fit your own needs. Think about how they could be for your own instruction, and let your imagination run wild!

Read more about Kinesthetic Grammar and check out some free activities on Alice and Colin’s blog post: Kinesthetic Grammar Activities. and check out all our drama activities and resources.

Storytelling for EFL Students

Storytelling is an important skill for EFL students to learn. In fact, being able to tell a story is a helpful human skill as we are constantly constructing narratives to explain what we are doing, to persuade others, to ask for help, to offer advice.

Many EFL students have trouble improvising fluently though. It’s hard to tell a story, remember the right words, get your grammar correct, and speak comprehensibly all in a foreign language. So students need a lot of practice telling a story and doing so fluently, without much hesitation.

So we’re giving away one of Cristian’s favorite lesson plans, one that improves fluency by taking some of the control away from the storyteller.

Improv Storytelling is a highly original activity for EFL students, one that also works with ESL/ESOL classes as well.It helps students practice telling an original story on the spot, without fear of making a mistake. There are some creative ways to come up with new ideas buried in this activity, so it also makes a nice warm-up to having students write. Or you may want to refer to it yourself when you have writer’s block.

Click the link below to check out the lesson. And if you do use it in class, please consider leaving a comment here and letting us know how it went.

Public Speaking in English is Scary. Drama Can Help

Poor Emilio! He seemed like such a confident student, but when he had to give a talk in front of the class, he ran to the bathroom and was sick. Emilio’s case might be extreme, but according to the psychologist, Michelle Lynsky, public speaking is one of the most terrifying experiences of modern life, and that’s for people performing in their first language.

To feel confident, speakers need to feel the audience is on their side. For this to happen, they need believe that a) they have something interesting to say, b) that the audience will understand it, and c) that they’ll enjoy the experience. Yet, it’s hard for the speaker to achieve that goal when staring out into a sea of blank faces.

Here’s where drama can help. The following activities from the brand-new The Drama Book can help students learn strategies for Public Speaking in English that build skills and confidence, whether they are presenting for a class, preparing for a high stakes job interview or meeting a friend’s parents for the first time.

A. Heart to Heart

Research suggests that when people reveal something personal about themselves, they feel closer to others, a major element of building the trust and community necessary for a public performance. In this activity, students all share a fear and then use that fear as the basis for a roleplay improvisation.

Aim: Build community and practice improvisation

Preparation: A question about the students’ personal experiences or opinions

Time: 10 minutes or more depending on class size

Activity

1. Have students stand in a circle. Start the activity with a bean bag. Give them a minute to think about something they are afraid of. Then tell them something you are afraid of and toss the beanbag randomly to a new speaker and invite them to share their fear. Then they toss the beanbag to the next speaker and so on until everyone has shared.
2. Next or on subsequent days, repeat with other questions such as the following.
   • Who is your hero?
   • What are you grateful for?
   • What is your biggest pet peeve? (A pet peeve is something that other people do that annoys you such as twirling their hair, tapping their leg, or interrupting.)
   • What do you wish people understood about you?
   • How can this group support you?

3. Take notes, or have students quickly write down their answers and hand them in. Later, use the information for improvisation games later. Here’s are two examples.

Loreta is afraid of snakes.

Improv: Benjamina, Xing and Raul are camping, and they are looking for wood to build a fire. Secretly tell Xing and Raul that they see a snake in tent, but they don’t want Benjamina to find out. What do they do?

Carolina is uncomfortable saying no.

Improv: Walter and Kaiko want Carolina to recommend them to her boss. Secretly tell Carolina that she is quite sure they will be nothing but trouble, so her goal is to convince them not to apply.

B. Best Dressed Guests

It can be difficult to transfer pronunciation practiced in drills to real world interactions. This consonant cluster activity helps students move from a focus on forming specific sounds to using prosody and stress to signal emotion and intention. By layering on meaning incrementally, it can give students a strategy not only for preparing speeches but also for practicing pitches to bosses or other authority figures.

Aim: To embed specific consonant cluster practice into communicative experiences.

Preparation: Prepare a sentence or set of sentences that contain the consonant cluster(s) that you want to work on.

Time: 10 minutes per round.

Activity

1. Write the sentence on the board. Discuss the sounds you want work on and practice with a drill. The following is an example with /st/ and /ts/ and / θ / and / ð/

         Steve and Beth were the best dressed guests at Christian’s gathering.

2. Say the sentence with two types of intonation. A: Say it with certainty. B: Say it as though you are doubtful. Have students guess whether your meaning is A or B. Practice the two types of intonation until students feel confident.

3. Have students work in pairs. One says the sentence with a specific intonation, the other guesses A: certainty or B: Doubt.

4. Add a line to create a two-part dialog. This time say A with confidence, and then B with either agreement or doubt, and have students guess again.

          A: Steve and Beth were the best dressed guests at Christian’s gathering.

          B: Best dressed. (agree)

          B: Best dressed? (Doubtful)

4. Switch partners and have pairs practice again with partners giving each other feedback on whether they understand agreement or disagreement.

Variation

Collect other sounds that will be useful for students to learn and repeat the process with new dialogs. Or have students write their own dialogs with the words containing consonant clusters. You can also have them elaborate by continuing the dialog.

/sc/ / ð/

A: I almost screamed when I saw that scary monster on my screen.

B: You screamed./?

/ts/

A: An expert editor corrects texts.

B: Corrects texts./?

C. Mini-Monologues

Actors make deliberate decisions about stress emphasis to communicate emotional messages and so much language learners if they do not want to sound wooden or even insincere. Whereas the general rule of thumb states that content words such as nouns and verbs get stressed, it is also true that we often need to stress small seemingly unimportant words to get meaning across, such as in contrastive stress. An extra benefit of this activity is that the performance of even a short-prepared monologue can help students become comfortable putting emotional resonance into their delivery.

*Note: To stress to a word, is not to necessarily say it louder but to lengthen the vowel sound.

Aim: To provide strategies for incorporating prosody into a public performance.

Preparation: Select one or more mini-monologues that have emotional messages. Make copies or prepare to display on a board or screen.

Time: varies according to class size

Activity

1. Create a recording of a monologue to play for students or read it aloud with emotional resonance and stress. Elicit the topic by asking, “What’s it about? Who is talking?” Next, discuss the mood of the speaker and any language choices that might reveal this emotion by asking, “How does the speaker feel?” and “What does the speaker want?”

Below are three very short monologues that reflect the functions of complaining, declining an invitation, and expressing concern. Each contains opportunities for                both emotional messaging and stress emphasis. You can choose one or do all three.

• The cat has fleas, so someone has to take her to the vet. It can’t be me! I’m busy. I’m already late for work. And it’s not my cat anyway. You’re the one that wanted a cat!
• I would love to come. . . really I would. It’s just that I have this thing I gotta do. If I could get out of it, I would, but I made a promise to a friend and I can’t let him down. (pause) Can I come another time?
• A car accident? Are you okay? (pause). Well that’s a relief!  Where are you? I’ll come and get you. Just give the address. (pause) The address! You don’t know where you are?  How am I going to find you? Are you sure you’re okay?

2. Give students copies or display the monologues. Review the speaker’s emotion/intention. Then discuss and mark thought groups and stress. (Every thought group has at least one stressed word.)

3. Have individual students choose one of the mini-monologues to work with or assign one. Give them ten minutes to memorize the monologue and plan the following elements:

• use stress emphasis and pauses
• express an emotion such as frustration, concern, or regret
• include gesture and expressions

4. Have student perform in groups and/or for the class. Give feedback on the various elements. Consider having them do a second monologue on their own as homework. They could even write it themselves.

This is a repost from Alice Savage’s blog: Public Speaking is Scary. Drama Can Help.

Looking for more?

Browse all our free resources for doing drama in the classroom at Plays and Drama Resources for Students. And be sure to check out Alice’s wonderful books full of dynamic activities to teach speaking skills through drama!

Prosody Practice: Talk Show Activity

Alice Savage, author of the forthcoming The Drama Book, has been doing plays with her students for a while now. But she wanted to know if the prosody practice her students have been doing with plays would transfer to other activities.

Her students have been using some of her plays in class. They’ve been focusing in particular on prosody practice (intonation, word stress, rhythm, gesture, and expressions) to express attitude and emotion when they speak. These skills using prosody are essential for effective spoken communication. But they’re only useful if students can use them in other settings.

So Alice decided to have them do a talk show activity (download the activity here). You may have heard of this kind of activity, or done it yourself. So you may prefer your own version.

But what I thought was very clever about Alice’s version was that it linked to her play work. In her version, the students are on a talk show to promote the play they are working on! And of course, a talk show or TV interview is a perfect context for using a broad range of verbal skills and prosody.

So did it work?

Alice says, “It was amazing! They joked, laughed and used emotional intonation beautifully. And as I noticed in the previous course, it felt as though their personalities had emerged.“

Communication skills can transfer from drama work to other contexts, which is very exciting. And as Alice hints, prosody opens up a whole new social world. Students can show warmth or annoyance or amusement as they speak. That may not be important for tourists or business travelers, but for people who want to live, work, and thrive in a foreign country, it’s very important!

Looking for more?

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

This activity was originally posted on Alice’s blog at https://englishendeavors.org/2019/06/22/a-talk-show-simulation-to-promote-a-play-or-movie/

Improvised Role Plays of Real-World Conversations

Improvisation allows students to prepare for real world situations, but often in regular role plays, the conversation runs more smoothly than in real life. In the real world, people find themselves challenged by awkward situations. In theater class, we address the pragmatics of minor conflicts through improvisation.

First, we might read a scene in which a character is trying to send implicit messages in a socially acceptable way, such as a restaurant owner wants to politely get rid of a job applicant who is trapped by a flood in Rising Water.

Students read the scene, discuss the intentions of the characters, and then reflect on times when they felt uncomfortable. They can answer a series of questions in pairs:  Where were they? Who were they with? What did they want? What did they say? What was the result? 

Afterwards, they share with the class, and the teacher elicits what they wanted to say to the board, for example, “Leave me alone,” and “Stop asking me questions.” Next, the teacher introduces fixed expressions that signal messages politely next to the blunt statements, e.g., “Well, I’d better let you go.” signals you want to leave. “It’s complicated,” can signal that you don’t want to answer a question. Or, a simple “I don’t remember.” Or “I’d rather not get into that right now,” might work depending on answers to what and who.

The next stage is to have students improvise scenes that challenge them to handle situations like these. Here are some examples.

At work: Colleagues – A wants to find out if B is pregnant or married without asking directly.

In the neighborhood: Two dog walkers – A wants to learn about the new neighbor, but the new neighbor, B, is in a hurry.

At school: A is trying to get a group task done, but B wants to chat.

At home: Roommates – A wants to study, but B wants A to go to a party.

You can also use the students’ own experiences, but help them reiterate them more gracefully.

It can be helpful to give students a little time to prepare their roles, but since this is an improvisation, five or ten minutes would be the maximum. Finally, have them take turns performing their improv for the class. The teacher can give notes afterwards on language, intonation, gesture, and other elements that can help students navigate potential discomfort in their interactions. Such and activity can actually be fun, as well as a way to give students confidence and skills for the real world.

Looking for more?

Browse all our free resources for doing drama in the classroom at Plays and Drama Resources for Students. And check out all of Alice’s plays for ESL students:

Play on Feelings: Using Intonation to Express Emotions

Intonation is notoriously difficult for English learners, yet it is important, particularly in English, for sending emotional messages. The role of intonation in English is complicated but generally English speakers use intonation to express emotion, as well as attitude! When we are worried about a situation, we may express that as much with our tone as our words. The listener needs to pick up on that worry in order to fully communicate. When our students speak, they also need to convey their feelings to help others understand their needs. On the other hand, sometimes we speak ironically. If our students can’t understand a sarcastic tone of voice, they will take away the opposite message from that the speaker intended.

And looking beyond communicating accurately, expressing and understanding the feelings and intentions of others, is key to making friends. Our students can’t have meaningful relationships in English unless they can speak with emotion. They do this naturally in their L1, of course, but it’s another story in another language. Often, our students are struggling with getting the words and grammar correct, perhaps even pronunciation. It’s a lot to ask them to also focus on tone. Furthermore, not every language is as expressive as English, so they have to learn the conventions of emotion and attitude conveyance in English.

So here’s a quick game to help practice using intonation to express emotions! I can it Play with Feelings!

The Activity

1. Pick a few short neutral statements. These expressions could come from a play you are working with or a TV show or film. Or they could be common conversational expressions. But you do need to choose statements that change meaning depending on the emotion or attitude of the speaker.  For example in the play Rising Water, a father returns home in the middle of a city-wide flood. He asks his wife where their son is. She answers:

I don’t know. Downtown, I think.

There are many ways the wife could say this. If she wants to convey her uncertainty, perhaps persuade the father to look for him, she might use a worried tone. However, if she wants to put him at ease and express faith in her son’s abilities, she can say this is a more casual tone. Perhaps she thinks the husband should be responsible for the son. Then she might say this quite angrily or defensively.

Each intonation carries a different emotion and requires a different response from the husband. Other expressions that work well for this include:

• What are you doing here?
• Can we talk?
• I’m not sure that’s completely true.
• I really think we need to figure this out.

2. Write the line you’ve chosen on the board. Then write three different emotions that are distinct such as worry, anger, and joy. Ensure that all three are appropriate for the line. Be sure students know what the words mean, and how to express them with their voice. You might want to model this (which can elicit some giggles and loosen students up).

3. Tell students they have to say pick an emotion and say the line with that feeling. The other students will guess which emotion they feel.

4. Encourage other students to give feedback.  They may say something like, “That’s not angry. This is angry. ‘What are YOU doing HERE?!?!” This gets them all practicing even more.

You can use this activity as a whole-class or in pairs or small groups. Students may want to start in small groups and then do some demonstrations in front of the class. It’s a great icebreaker or quick activity for the beginning or end of class.

Extension Idea

If you’re working with a script (be it a scene or a whole play), you’d then have them go through the script and mark the emotions they feel their character uses.

You can also go on to discuss each line and what the relationship and context might be. Students can go on to write a whole role-play based on a line and an emotion. Following that, have them imagine a situation from their own lives where they might use that emotion. They can role-play and practice dealing with that situation!

More resources to practice intonation to express emotions

• Check out our series of plays and dram activity books.
• Browse our blog posts on teaching with plays including this article on using scripted dramas to teach speaking skills,
• Check out our other drama-based activities: Teaching Students the Pragmatics of Honesty, Ten Ways to Teach English with a Play, Wearing Someone Down, How to Praise Someone , Wedding Party Simulation, and Intonation Sensation.

Pragmatics is Everywhere

I got this amazing feedback from an educator about one of our drama books and how teaching pragmatics resonates with her students:

I introduced the idea of using [Her Own Worst Enemy] in the classroom to my principal, and she loved the idea! I also did a tiny lesson on pragmatics with some of my ninth graders, and they seemed to enjoy it. A few weeks after the lesson, a special needs student was able to connect pragmatism to another lesson we were doing. There are powerful things for students to learn in this play!

This is why we keep putting out books. It’s always inspiring to hear that they are having an impact on teachers and on students alike. And learning more about pragmatics, thanks to my time working on this project with Alice Savage, has impacted my life as well. I had never given so much thought to the ways our daily communication are affected by the social rules about how to act in different situations and contexts.

Or the broad range of communicative tools we use beyond grammar and vocabulary! We use tone, intonation, allusions and references, poses, facial expressions, body language, and rhetorical strategies when we speak, We often do this unconsciously, so we are far more aware of pragmatics when we have to interpret it in other people. And interpreting someone’s intentions through their verbal and nonverbal cues is as important as communicating. But every day, to paraphrase David Crystal, we make choices of what we will say and how we will say it. We make these choices in order to get certain effects based on our understanding of the context, our relationship with the speaker, and our needs and wants. All of this is pragmatics, a kind of hidden language of communication.

Pragmatics is about Choices

Imagine a few different scenarios.

• A teenager wants to borrow $20 for a video game from their mother the day after crashing the family car into a telephone pole.
• A teenager wants to borrow $10 for a book from their father who is often indulgent.
• A worker wants an advance of $500, about 50% of next week’s pay check, just after the company announced it was going to be keeping a close eye on finances.
• A worker wants a raise of $50 a week (about 5%) after getting an excellent annual review.
• A 20-year old whose birthday is coming up wants to ask their uncle, whom they rarely see, who sometimes gives a gift and sometimes doesn’t, for $100 toward a racing bike.

Each is a situation of a person asking someone in a superior position for something. But the relationship, current situation, and context are very different in each. The stakes are also different. And that means the way these people will ask will be very different. In some cases, they can be very direct. In other cases, they need to be more indirect, and persuasive. Perhaps they will need to be manipulative or cajoling. We make these choices automatically. But a student from another country and culture, one with different rules, may have trouble understanding how to navigate these different situations in their new context. Particularly as they are also working on using the right words and grammar!

That’s why methods used to teach children, who are also new to the world and less steeped in social and cultural rules, are often a good place to look for how to teach pragmatics to ESL or EFL students.

Why Do Strangers Smile at Me?

For example, when my son was 6 years old, he asked me why strangers sometimes smile at him when he does or says something cute in public. It seemed like such an odd question. Of course we smile at small children. We do it all the time. So I told him people tend to like children and smile when they see a child doing something cute. It’s meant to be positive.

“But do I have to smile back?” he asks. Now, this is an important question. It’s not enough to just interpret other people’s meanings. You also have to know what is expected of you in a social situation.

“No, you don’t have to do anything,” I tell him, “They’re just being nice. You can smile back or wave, if you want. But you don’t have to.”

“Are they laughing at me?” Another important question. How do we know when people are being insulting? At what age do we expect to be treated seriously? How do we balance a child’s need to be recognized as a being with legitimate needs and feelings with the reality that children can be (and should be) childish sometimes.

“Probably not,” I tell him, “Not in a mean way. Maybe they secretly wish they could do the things you can do because you’re a kid.” I’m reminding him that relationships and context matter. Adults can’t act like kids. Husbands and wives can’t treat each other like strangers. A boss can’t talk to employees the same way she talks to her children, or nephews, or neighbors.

This question reminds me of my students who sometimes ask why Americans smile all the time. In many places, smiling is a sign of enjoyment. It’s only done in social situations when people are happy and having fun! In the US, it’s often a kind of greeting. We smile to show that we are friendly and open or to take the edge off of our words. Students who misinterpret this think Americans are silly. They may even think that someone smiling at them is a sign of romantic interest. And when they fail to smile as they greet someone, they can come off as cold. So pragmatics really does matter. And it really does have to be taught

Our line of drama textbooks that teach pragmatics through plays

Teaching with Stories is Teaching Pragmatics

I’ve also noticed my son’s school used to teach manners and classroom behavior (i.e. pragmatics) through social stories. Social stories are simple descriptions of good behavior and the reasons for them. They read a bit like the Gallant side of Goofus and Gallant from Highlights.

“Walton washes his hands when he comes inside after playing. His hands have dirt on them from all the things he touched outside. He doesn’t want to spread that dirt inside. And sometimes dirt can make us sick . . . “

The children read these stories, talk about the choices the characters make, and the reasons for those choices. Then the teacher reminds them of these stories at appropriate times of the day. After recess the teacher can say, “Time to wash hands. Do you remember what the boy in the story did? He counted to twenty while he rubbed.” There are even TV shows like Daniel the Tiger that make these social stories a lot more entertaining and turn these little lessons into unforgettable songs (Seriously, they are earworms from hell, but quite effective!).

Sometimes at school, the teacher even acted out the social stories with toys. I know this because my son used to ask me to act these things out with his toys! His bears have broken each other’s toys without saying sorry, refused to play with each other, and even told mommy they don’t want to go to the store today. Once they wouldn’t eat dinner at all, not even one little bite. It’s a great way to model what to do in difficult situations and give students the lamguage they need to navigate difficult situations as well as the kinds of variables we look for in difficult situations (Maybe the boy who snapped at you was tired or angry about something else, or you hurt his feelings without realizing it.)

Unless you teach young children, you’ll want to do roleplays, not act things out with toys. Awareness of pragmatics can even spice up your roleplays, even the most mundane ones. And prepare students for real-life situations where things can break down! Textbook roleplays always feel too dry and efficient and realistic to me! And a good roleplay is not only a great teaching tool, it’s genuinely engaging. It’s a play, because you’re creating a real situation. And it’s pragmatics. It’s teaching the reasons we make the social choices we do.

Play with Pragmatics

Now, the social situations our students are navigating are often more complex than what to do when you accidentally break a friend’s toy. But plays have a message in them. And that message is put into everyday language. In fact, plays are perfect for the language classroom because most plays are a series of conversations. The goal of a playwright is to leverage pragmatics effectively so that the dialogue sounds natural, the characters act like normal people would (with perhaps a little bit of heightened drama), and the resolution is satisfying (or unsatisfying for good reason).

So when we do plays with students, we’re teaching them how to act in certain situations. We’re showing them why people do the things they do (and those actions and reasons can be very different in different cultures) and we’re giving them the language to navigate these situations. And as our reviewer said, students really respond to it.

Looking for more?

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

How to do a Play with ESL Students

Producing a play in class can be an amazing learning experience. Drama is more than just a way to cover a book or a fun treat! Plays are a powerful too for teaching speaking skills, particularly natural, authentic English conversation. And producing a play is a great group project, a fantastic example of project-based learning. However, doing a play can be a challenge. So our author, Alice Savage has provided her extensive and valuable experience in how to do a play with ESL students!

She produced her own original play, Rising Water, with her community college students. You may need to find plays of different levels and topics to take into account your students’ age and level. But the basic process of producing a play in class is the same! And the payoffs are just as rich!

Why do a play in the ESL classroom?

Thunder claps, lightning strikes, and rain begins to fall as two high school students approach the bus stop. Magnus is a model child with good grades, Ajax is a bit of a misfit But as an ordinary autumn rain turns into a natural disaster, the issue what kind of people we’ll really need in the future is called into question in a new way.

In the production of this exciting play, the audience responds viscerally to the action and the performances of the students. When a play goes well, something miraculous happens. The actors’ classmates, teachers and friends are following the plot. They understand the pronunciation, and they empathize with the characters. These ESL actors have brought a story to life, and they have done it in English. Plays are not only powerful stories and speaking practice: they are great group work opportunities.

To being the group together, however, they had to do some work. In this elective, an integrated skills through theater class, students took on the ultimate group project, a play. In this post, we will share Alice’s process and her advice for how to do a play with ESL students. It’s not as difficult as you might think!

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Intonation Sensation: An Activity to Teach Sentence Stress

English speakers use intonation to express meaning, which other languages don’t necessarily do. In some languages, intonation is applied at the sentence level. Intonation may be linked to the meaning of the word. But English speakers use intonation to indicate their attitude and emphasize what’s important and what isn’t. One feature of English that is far from universal is the way we emphasize words in a sentence, so it’s important to teach sentence stress whenever we do pronunciation work.

What is sentence stress?

Don’t be fooled by the name. Sentence stress is how we emphasize vocally particular words in our sentences. We can do this by saying the stressed word louder than other words, pausing before and after the stressed word, using our facial expressions when we say the word, or holding the word for longer, or even changing our tone. We use it to indicate which word or words are the most important, which word we want the listener to pay attention to. For a more detailed explanation and example sentences, check out this post by ESL Library.

Students who speak languages that don’t use sentence stress have to learn to listen for it, and also hopefully employ it. As I’ve said many times, these kinds of prosodic features are far more important to comprehension than accent! Misunderstanding or misusing sentence stress can have serious impacts on communication, as the activity below demonstrates.

The quick and easy activity below comes from the drama textbook Rising Water by Alice Savage, which includes a short play for students. To teach sentence stress, it’s helpful to draw awareness to it first!  Students can listen to the audio recording of the play to hear where those actors chose to put their word emphasis, and decide why the actor made those choices. But any video of proficient English speakers speaking fluently and freely will work. Have students listen for the words that stand out and then think about why the speaker emphasized those particular words.

How to Teach Sentence Stress

1. Find a sentence where the meaning can change depending on the word being stressed. Note that usually content words are stressed, but this isn’t always true! You can pull these sentences from a play or reading you are working on! Example sentences could be:
   • At least my life isn’t boring.
   • What are you doing here?
   • I thought you said you would help me do the cleaning.
   • What did the doctor say on the phone?
2. Demonstrate how putting the emphasis on different words in a sentence changes the meaning. You can read the sentence below with the indicated emphasis and elicit the meaning, or explain as needed.
   • At least MY life isn’t boring. = Your life is boring.
   • At least my LIFE isn’t boring. = Something else, such as my work, is boring.
   • At least my life isn’t BORING. = My life may have problems in other areas.
3. For more advanced students, you can have them imagine the scene in which this line is being said. What are the emotions? What is the larger idea the speaker is trying to convey? Here’s each line put into a context to give an idea what the speaker may be thinking.
   • You can criticize me for my risky choices all you want. At least MY life isn’t boring. I have fun. I have friends. You just go to work and go home and waste your day being boring!
   • At least my LIFE isn’t boring. I hate my job. I’m not close to my family. I have one thing going for me, this one habit which I enjoy, even though it may be a bit dangerous.
   • Ok, maybe my habits cause me some serious problems, but At least my life isn’t BORING. I have fun and that’s what’s really important to me.
4. Hand out a list of sentences that can be emphasized in different places. You may want to take this from a text or script you are working with or see above for some suggestions. Students could also elicit examples.
5. Put students in pairs. Partner A says the first sentence, picking a word to emphasize. Partner B says where they think the sentence stress fell and what they think it means.
6. Students take turns reading and listening until they have done all the sentences. Then switch.
7. To extend, students can discuss what situation they think the speaker is in and create longer scenes or role plays using the lines they practiced. If you’re doing a play, they can mark words they want to emphasize.

Let me know how this activity goes in the classroom. And share any ideas you may have to teach sentence stress in the classroom!

More resources to practice intonation and sentence stress

• Check out our series of plays and dram activity books.
• Browse our blog posts on teaching with plays including this article on using scripted dramas to teach speaking skills,
• Check out our other drama-based activities: Teaching Students the Pragmatics of Honesty, Ten Ways to Teach English with a Play, Wearing Someone Down, How to Praise Someone , Wedding Party Simulation, and Play on Feelings.