by James Savery
Children at primary age generally enjoy acting out roles. Parents can testify to this when they observe their children playing ‘doctors and nurses’. There are important developmental benefits in stepping into a character’s shoes, by seeing the world from their perspective and empathising with these other roles. As a language teacher of young children, I’ve also found drama excellent for linguistic improvement too. It’s been one of my ‘go to’ teaching techniques for 3 - 12 year olds.
'Short and Sweet'
My DELTA tutor's favourite teaching axiom was: 'Limitation is stimulation.' When we look at using dialogues in our young learner classroom, the best way to keep this maxim in mind is to focus on short dialogues.
Here's a dialogue which I made up based on traditional stories of various cultures about catching a magic fish: the version in my lesson was about a child fishing with their grandpa. We did the story over two lessons and the students acted out this dialogue based on their favourite bit of the tale.
A: Is this the magic fish?
B: No, it isn't. Throw it back.
A: What about this one?
B: Yes! That's the one! Let's look at it.
A mere four lines of dialogue - and yet it is full of essential conversational features that we want our students to master: questions, imperatives, reply tags, and this and that as conversation referents.
Introducing the dialogue
It’s easy to bring the dialogue into your young learner classroom - just follow these simple steps to make it work for you.
First, set up the context, ideally with visual prompts. In this case I drew a stick figure sketch on the whiteboard:
Establish with the children what's going on and who the people are. A good 'attention getter' and segue to the next step is this activity: the teacher calls out some phrases from the dialogue and the students predict who says it:
Teacher: Throw it back!
Children: Grandpa;
Teacher: Can I try now?
Children: The boy/girl!
You’re now ready to introduce the dialogue itself to your students, but you want to present it in a way that involves the students. For example,
- Give pairs of students the lines of the dialogue jumbled up for them to reorder.
- Write the dialogue on the board with only the first letters of some words:
A: I_ t__ t__ magic fish?
The students try to guess the missing words and you write them in if they’re right
Now that the dialogue is in front of the students, be wary of diving straight in. Young learners typically need more scaffolding than you might realise, so take your time and model the dialogue yourself. You need your acting skills for this!
Clear some space in the classroom. Students stand in a semi-circle while you perform the dialogue, either with a puppet, a classroom assistant, or one of the students - if you think they’re ready to try.
When you’ve done all that, it’s time to move to production…
Practising and performing
Give the students their own copy of the dialogue. Model and drill each line of the dialogue chorally, with some individual drilling too. Break the lines of dialogue down and model meaningful chunks where this is helpful. Aim for quite a high standard of pronunciation and encourage lively intonation!
Have your students practise the dialogue in pairs. Circulate and do some pronunciation coaching.
When the students have a good handle on the pronunciation, it’s time to add the acting element - they’re not preparing to speak on the radio, after all! Encourage them to use facial expressions to show emotion, and mime and gesture, e.g. showing the fish.
Finally, ask students to learn their part by heart, turning over the lines of the dialogue until they have it memorised.
The curtain is about to be raised on your little production…
The students can be given the task of organising the space for their ‘stage’ and can create props to go along with their performance. In my lesson, the children enjoyed making paper fish from pieces of card to which I had stuck small magnets. They also assembled a fishing rod using string, a chopstick, and another magnet.
The students can now perform the dialogues. Record them on a phone so that you can share the video with the whole class (there’s nothing like seeing yourself up on the big screen - but do be conscious of data protection and your school’s policies where making recordings is concerned), or if the class isn't too big, simply take turns to perform in front of it.
Further tips
As you can see, the use of dialogues in class is not a terribly difficult business, but here are some more helpful tips to smooth the way.
- Introduce the dialogue with clear, simple steps that keep the children's attention. If you can tell that their attention is wandering, that’s because you’ve tried to tell them too much without their active involvement.
- Include a simple warm-up activity which involves movement, especially if the class is not used to drama activities.
- Use a short dialogue to supplement a grammar lesson. E.g. Present Continuous:
Can you help me?
Not now. I'm doing my homework.
No, you aren't!
Yes, I am.
You're looking at Instagram
No, I'm not. My phone is helping me with my homework.
- When your students begin their rehearsals, give them some space - don’t go breathing down their necks, listening for mistakes right from the start! When they do get going, be sure to offer plenty of praise and encouragement.
- However, your students will benefit from performance tips after they’ve done some rehearsals.
- Try to avoid gender stereotyping in the dialogues you choose, so that roles can be acted out equally by girls and boys.
- Write your own dialogues for teaching, but be careful not to contrive it to 'force' in practice items so that it sounds unnatural.
- Give your students the freedom to customize the original dialogue, using it as a template on which to build their own ideas.
- Give your students as much control over the stage dynamics as possible - including props as well as the management of physical space. The more they have to think about - and discuss! - the better; drawing a connection with art and design strengthens cross-curricular themes.
- Incorporate drama improvisation when teaching functional or situational English such as when buying something in a shop.
- If you’re using a coursebook, ask your students to select one small segment of a coursebook dialogue to practise dramatically (rather than mechanically reading out the whole thing).
The Benefits of Using Dialogues with Young Learners
Getting your younger learner students to 'drama up', or dramatize a dialogue has a number of benefits. It involves the students in an active way, and engages their feelings, leading to emotional development and an increase in empathy as they adopt roles beyond themselves.
Dialogues are built to be repeated, but there is a sense of fun - not to mention accomplishment - that comes with such repetition, and it is through the repetition of dramatic material that young learners commit language to memory. This language often appears as natural chunks, too, which makes it even more useful.
Dialogues should be delivered with panache and style, and most children will realise this early on - leading to a great opportunity to develop their pronunciation beyond the level of the individual phoneme or the word, and up to the length of the clause, with all the attendant concerns with intonation that come with it.
Using dialogues in class and acting out short scenes allows for a lot of self-expression and creativity, but at a more basic level it also means the children can be physically active - perfect if you need something to get them up and out of their seats.
And finally, the di- in dialogue can be usefully compared with the mono- in monologue - in other words, the very nature of the dialogue requires cooperation and teamwork, difficult skills for young learners to master, but here they have every reason to want to get better at working with each other. Success depends upon it!
Author Biography
James has worked in ELT for more than 30 years. His first two jobs were teaching business English for IH Turin, then shortly after teaching mainly children at IH Coimbra, Portugal. He later became a teacher trainer and these days his main roles are writing and editing ELT materials. He has also worked in Thailand, Spain, Bahrain and Bolivia. He now lives in Krakow, Poland.