Ticket to Ride?
A Creative and Personalised Approach to Everyday Transactional Roleplays such as Buying a Railway Ticket

David Heathfield

David Heathfield is a freelance interpersonal skills trainer, storyteller, storymaker, actor and writer. He also teaches English and runs workshops for teachers at Exeter University, UK. He is the author of Spontaneous Speaking: Drama Activities for Confidence and Fluency (DELTA Publishing 2005). www.davidheathfield.co.uk

Menu

Old Chestnut
Case study

Old chestnut

There is a long-established and rather unexciting tradition of presenting service transactions, such as buying a railway ticket at the station ticket office, by means of a short dialogue rich in lexis and functional language. Students are then asked to practise the dialogue and come up with a similar one to the model, substituting different destinations, times and prices. Roleplay would certainly seem to be an ideal way of learning and practising these key items, but all too often the exchange is uninteresting and has little intrinsic value. The students are simply activating the target language. To engage the students and to turn a dull exchange into something worth doing involves very little other than personalisation and a pinch of drama.

In this article I will first explain an approach I use by describing an activity and then provide a case study of one student's experience of doing this activity. The approach gives students the opportunity to practise functional and situational language in all sorts of contexts and with students of all levels. In this case, let's have a fresh look at that old chestnut, buying the rail or coach ticket:

1. Tell the students the story of a time you had a problem buying a ticket at a railway or coach station. The story should involve you and the person selling the ticket. If you don't have a story in mind, invent or embellish one, but don't let the students know that it is not true at this stage. Set the scene and describe the main events including details that you'd naturally use to illustrate the anecdote, such as feelings (e.g. when I got there I was feeling perfectly calm), relevant facts (e.g. leaves on the track) and extra colour (e.g. there was this awful feedback from the microphone she was talking into). Be expressive, showing as well as describing the emotions you went through. You might even use movement and gestures to illustrate the story, but avoid acting the story out at this stage. Make sure you describe the ticket seller's behaviour and possibly their appearance. You might deliberately include some vocabulary and chunks of language that you might expect your students to use.

2. When you get to the climax of the story, in other words the moment when the outcome could go either way, stop emphatically. Ask students to guess the outcome before telling them the rest of the story. This may re-engage students who are losing track!

3. Ask students to guess whether the story is true and, if it is, how accurately you related the story and discuss how much license to exaggerate people have when they tell a problem anecdote of this kind (are there limits?). You've told your personal anecdote. It is so much better to tell your own story than one you got from a book. It will be personal and your students will sense this and appreciate you telling them more about yourself.

4. Now it's time to add the drama. Invite a student to play you and tell the students that you are going to play the other person, in my case the ticket seller. The reason for this is that it may be easier for the student to 'be you' because they know you and they can imagine your behaviour in that story. Also they've heard the events from your point of view. You, on the other hand, might well remember the attitude and even mannerisms of the other person concerned. Reassure the student that even if the performance is quite different from the story you told, this does not matter. Ask the others to listen and pay attention to similarities and differences between the original story and the re-enactment. Make a frozen picture with the student as if you were at the station and start. The dialogue might last anything between one and three minutes.

5. At the end of the re-enactment, invite comments. You might be surprised at how the student has portrayed you and you can also ask for other students' views on this.

6. Now ask students whether they have an anecdote to tell about buying a rail or coach ticket, whether true, exaggerated or false. Once half the students have indicated that they have a story, ask the ones without a story to tell to pair off with them and to find out as much as possible about the events before guessing how true the story is. This is also preparation for the subsequent re-enactment and should lead to close and attentive listening and questioning.

7. Ask all the pairs to simultaneously make a frozen starting picture and to bring the stories to life. Once completed, tell all the pairs who are willing that they are going to show their scenes to the rest of the class. The listening students' task is to work out the context, and make mental notes about the experience and the outcome as well as to guess how true to life the stories are. As with any story, the key element is a problem that needs resolving. Suddenly the exercise becomes meaningful with the students becoming interested in what other pairs say. The exchange is more authentic-sounding than the bland ones often proposed in published coursebooks.

8. Optional extension. The range, appropriateness and accuracy of the language used is likely to vary depending on the students in the group. If necessary, you can make notes of good use and of errors during the performances and use these notes as study material directly afterwards. The scenes could then be performed a second time focusing on the use of the language learned. Students could partly script these scenes, extending and embellishing them for performance as well as focusing on these language points. The stories may well become more comic in the process. The following performance will be more polished and will still be based on students' own creations.

On a first reading you may have the impression that the above approach is too loose in structure and is therefore impractical. You might feel that a concrete written dialogue is required as a starting point for the lesson. I would argue that there is a real risk of losing our students' interest when we use these anonymous texts too regularly. When we as teachers provide the model, students have a reference point and a context. It is the most natural thing in the world to want to know more about the people in front of and around you.

Case study

One of the students I am currently teaching here in Exeter, UK is a Korean man called Deok. This activity proved in his case to be much more than a language exercise. In fact it was a chance for him to express himself in a deeply personal way and even to act upon and resolve an unfortunate situation. To illustrate this, let's go straight to Stage 7 of the activity I described above. The ticket sales assistant was played by Deok, who in turn was played by Deok's partner. I audio-recorded the exchange and, with Deok's permission, it is transcribed faithfully here:

- Hello.
- Yeah.
- I'd like to buy a ticket to London on 1st April, please. Return ticket. (rudely) What? What do you say?
- Um. Can I book return ticket to London on ..er.. 1st April, please?
- 1st April?
- 1st April, yeah.
- OK. (sounding bored)What time do you want?
- I noticed there are three trains going to London between 11 o'clock and 1 o'clock. Which one is the cheapest, please?
- OK, you can go .. you can go to London at about 10 o'clock.
- I want to go to London some time between 11 o'clock and 1 o'clock, some time between 11 o'clock and 1 o'clock. What time is the cheapest one, please?
- The price the same so you can go to London at 10 o'clock.
- 10 o'clock? OK. 10 o'clock. That's good, please. So I'll have that one…
- (assistant prints out ticket)
- ...oh yeah, sorry… I've got a student railcard here.
- Uh? (becoming hostile) You should.. you should have shown me before you bought ticket.
- I'm sorry. It's my first time, sorry I didn't know.
- Aah! (Assistant angrily throws computer mouse at customer and it hits the window which they are talking through)………OK. (aggressively) This is ticket. On 1st April you can go to London.
- Thank you. Listen. (with a hint of sarcasm) It's very kind of you. I'm sorry if I made you angry.

It became evident that Deok was not exaggerating and had been genuinely upset by the rudeness of the sales assistant, to the extent that he felt uncomfortable about going to Exeter Central Station ticket office again in future. Even though he is an able speaker of English and has an outgoing personality, his confidence had been knocked by the experience.
I offered him the chance to play the scene again this time with me playing a very friendly and helpful rail ticket sales assistant. This process had a profound effect on him. Afterwards he commented to me:
'I felt how angry I was' (referring to the initial transaction re-enactment). 'Someone is hearing my problem. My feeling is getting better. You understand me' (referring to the second 'ideal' roleplay).
He was very concerned about the effects of this kind of behaviour on overseas students in the UK and welcomed the suggestion that he should write an email to customer services complaining about the way he was dealt with. Here is the email he sent (we await the reply):

If a student describes such a difficult encounter, we have to be careful to give them a choice about what they disclose in the class and we need to be aware of how the problem is left. Personally I am glad that Deok had a chance to offload his concerns and deal with them.

By no means all students describe such difficult encounters. Some involve humorous misunderstandings and other stories are about students' own mistakes such as not having enough money to pay. The differences and similarities between stories are part of the enjoyment.

The fact that I teach in the UK means that students tend to refer to experiences here in what to them is a foreign culture, but there is no reason not to ask students to re-enact in English encounters experienced originally in their mother tongue.

Buying a rail ticket is just one of hundreds of situations that can be practised in this way. Job interviews, shopping, asking favours and asking directions are just a few more examples. Pooling class members' real-life experiences, no matter how low-key they might at first appear, is a successful way of bringing a group together and developing an atmosphere of genuine involvement in each other's stories.

Some useful techniques for bringing students' outside worlds alive in the classroom include:

- teacher modelling (in the activity described above, the teacher tells an anecdote)

- setting peer listening tasks (above, listening in order to work out the context and guess how true it is)

- inviting students to involve themselves in their partners' real-life experiences (above, students share their partner's experience by stepping into their shoes)

- re-enacting real-life conversations (above, the roleplay is based on students' real-life encounters)

The results of using these personalised drama techniques include:

- reciprocal self-disclosure among group members (the more I tell you about myself, the more you tell me about yourself)

- learners involve themselves in each other's lives

- positive impact on group cohesion and dynamics

Thanks go to Mario Rinvolucri, John Morgan, Keith Johnstone for introducing me to the concepts behind this approach in their writings.

Please check the Creative Drama For The Language Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Secondary Teaching course at Pilgrims website.