Level: intermediate and above

Target audience: teenagers and adults

Language skills focus: integrated skills: writing, reading, speaking, listening, creative writing, telling stories, comprehension, and improvisation.

Materials: Lesson from Improvisations for Creative Language Practice by Lou Spaventa. Available from Pro Lingua Publishers, Brattleboro, Vermont 05302, USA.
Webstore: www.ProLinguaAssociates.com
The materials are 44 stand alone lessons of two pages which are photocopiable, and call for short improvisations by one to six students.

BACKGROUND

In a way, every communicative situation where two or more people are interacting is a kind of improvisation. There may be a set of patterns associated with the interaction, but the specifics are constantly being created on the spot. Language learners do the same when they put their language to use "on the street." They do the best they can with what they have. The improvisatory lesson is an attempt to loosen the strictures of classroom language practice and allow for the creativity of the individual student. The instructor can assess what a student knows by how he or she goes about building a story or an improvisation, thus providing an ad hoc assessment measure of student language. The lessons in Improvisations for the Language Classroom are varied and the instructor and students are invited to choose which ones work for them. The following lesson is intended for a class of anywhere from 5 to 50 intermediate level students. Instructors should, of course, adapt materials to their own classroom needs.
I hope the lesson works for you and that you enjoy doing it as much as I have enjoyed creating it.

CHILDREN AT THE WINDOW

A. Think back to a rainy day when you were young. How did you pass the time? Write about it for five minutes.

B. Go around the room. Read your story to as many people as you can. Listen to the stories of your classmates. As you listen, make notes on what is similar to and what is different from the rainy days of your childhood.

Instructor assigns story to be read silently. It can also be read aloud by the instructor or by students on a volunteer basis, one sentence at a time. Vocabulary should be addressed during the reading.

The drops of water make a puddle near the door. The rain has been coming down for hours. Yesterday it was winter, but today the rain brings warm air and the first breath of spring. Two children are sitting by the window. They are looking out at the rain. In the kitchen, a woman is stirring a cookie mix in a bowl. The smell of hot chocolate fills the kitchen. It drifts out to the children.
One child puts her hand around the shoulder of the other. She is about to speak.

Questions

After the reading, the instructor can lead the questioning or divide the class into pairs or groups to handle for the students to do it themselves. The questions are designed to tease out the imagination and creativity of the students, and to anticipate the improvisation that follows.

1. What do the children see outside the window? 2. What are the children thinking? 3. Who is the woman in the kitchen? 4. Why is she making cookies? 5. What relationship do the children have to each other? 6. Why did one child put her hand around the shoulder of the other child? 7. What is the child going to say?

The instructor directs students to form groups of three (although this number can be adjusted to the class size. Some students can double roles or serve as scribes for the group if group size needs to be over three). In the groups, students are free to create the characters by using the chart that follows.

Create the three characters by using the chart below.

After students have worked out their characters, have them rehearse dialogue based on the story and the characters. The instructor may need to help some groups by suggesting possible scenarios based on what the group has come up with so far. Students should not write down every line, but may make notes to help them remember ideas that they want to communicate.
With your group, plan out what happens in the story. Then perform the story. Try to continue talking for five minutes.

Note: Each group should have its time to perform for their classmates.
Perfection is not the goal. Communication is. While students perform, the instructor may want to make notes towards future lessons based on what he or she hears and sees in the performances.
One further refinement is to create an evaluation form for the performance based upon some learning goal such as clarity in enunciation or naturalness of movement. The form can be used by the student as a self-evaluation form, by the class for each group, or by the instructor for each group.