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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 2; March 03

Lesson outlines

7-1 Conversation

Before Class: No preparation required
Aim: get students using more chunks rather than full sentences when speaking
Time: 20 minutes
Procedure:

  1. Write the following on the board:
    _ _ _ _ _ _ _
    _ _ _ _ _ _
    _ _ _ _ _
    _ _ _ _
    _ _ _
    _ _
    _

  2. Pair students and ask them to write a dialogue following the diagram above, i.e. the first utterance has 7 words, the second 6 and so on down to one.

  3. When students have finished get them to read aloud their dialogues to other pairs or to whole class.

    An example of student text:

    - What are you going to do tonight?
    - I'm going to see a film?
    - Which film and what time?
    - Harry Potter, at 7
    - Can I come?
    - Of course.
    - Great.

    Variation: Students prepare a dialogue. This time the restriction is that they have to begin the first utterance with the letter A the second with B and so on through the alphabet.

    An example of student text:

    - Ann, hi.
    - Be careful . There's a big dog beside you. - Cat? - Dog, not cat. - Exactly, I like dogs - Fine. Take him home. I think he's lost
    - Great idea
    etc

    Rationale: This is an immensely artificial exercise which has immensely naturalistic results and mirrors the pattern of real spoken grammar. The more a conversation progresses the less grammar and the more chunks come into play. Again this exercise forces the students to chunk rather than use full sentences and mirrors lots of the features of spoken grammar.

    Acknowledgement: Mario Rinvolucri came up with the 7-1 exercise and he learnt it at a Christina Hall NLP workshop on "re-laanguaging".