CiC3-TB

Sentences in Unit 1 (Getting Acquainted). One card has been left intentionally blank to encourage students to create their own original characters. A template of blank cards can also be found in this book. This can be photocopied, cut up, and given to students for making a set of character cards unique to your class.

• Remember that you can use timed conversations at any point in a unit at any stage of a lesson. For example, it works great as a warm-up task at the beginning of class to review earlier material. In addition, the How about you? model dialogs can also be conducted in this manner. Guided Role-play Another traditional activity for practicing speaking is role-play. Here students pretend to be another character while carrying out conversations. One of the great benefits of role-playing is that it engages the imagination and facilitates natural creativity and humor. Students get a break from always talking about themselves, which if done too much can become rather tedious. When students role-play, they are forced to move beyond canned conversations and improvise language on the spot, just as they do in real life. As a result, role-playing from time to time will help students develop the spontaneity and quick-thinking skills they will need to communicate effectively outside of class.

Teaching tips: • Conduct the role-play just as you would a regular timed conversation. • The first time through, be sure to model the task with a few students. Demonstrate how to go beyond the basic information on the card. Encourage students to come up with extra details and questions on the spot. • This activity works great as a review. Students will have a chance to improvise answers to questions they have already learned. You will find that it naturally brings out what they know in a fun and creative way. How long will it take? As long as you want! 5 minutes to warm-up or fill time at the end of class, or 30 minutes of timed conversations- it’ up to you!

To facilitate the role-play process, we have included ready-made character cards which students can use to quickly create characters. These cards can be found at the back of the book, along with bi-lingual step-by-step directions for completing this task. Each character comes with a list of basic information. This information corresponds to the Model

How do I teach the ~ ? 16