Teaching dialogue in beginner english classes Introduction Main body

Ways for Teaching Speaking through Monologue and
Dialogue in Beginner English Classes


Teaching a language is like building. Imagine you are building a house. To build it you need bricks. With the bricks and cement, you construct the walls. A dialogue is like a house. It is made up of individual words like the bricks. Those words make sentences like the walls. The finished house is the dialogue. With this in mind start by teaching the vocabulary words in your dialogue. I use games for this, starting with listening games like Jump the Line, and moving to speaking games.[4] You might think that you aren't getting anywhere, but these steps are necessary. Consider that you are building good foundations for your house! Next introduce short phrases or sentences from the dialogue and drill them. Always start with listening games to drill these so students hear them repeatedly before you expect them to say them. Release students to rehearse in pairs. Do some reading and writing tasks with the dialogues. If students are allowed to invent the last two lines of the dialogue, that could be interesting, but it would be too slow to implement with complete beginners unless you have very small groups. Reading puzzles are great, as is a game like Find a Friend where students each have a part of the dialogue. They have to find another student who has the previous sentence.
Game to rehearse the dialogue as a class: Now you have worked with the dialogue a fair bit, try this. Put students into teams. Some students stand and mime the dialogue, silently. They act it as best they can, making gestures but never speaking. When the teacher claps students stop miming. The other teams have to say the next line to be delivered. This sort of activity can seem intimidating for students to start with, but they will soon get used to it. Give a good demonstration with one of the better students so the class understands the task. This activity is interesting because all students are engaged at once. Students have to mentally follow the dialogue, which helps fluency, even though they aren't actually speaking. If you try that, do let me know how it goes! I'd love to hear about it. If you can make the dialogue somewhat interesting or dramatic, so much the better. Try using my plays and skits, or extracts from them. The dialogues are repetitive and use limited vocabulary, making them ideal for beginners. If you don't have my games books, you'll find lots of games to help you teach vocabulary and sentences, so you can build towards dialogues.[5] This primary school age games book is perfect, even if you have a large class. When talking with someone, it is helpful to know what type of conversation you are in. You can do so based on a conversation’s direction of communication a one-way or two-way street and its purpose competitive or cooperative. If you are in a one-way conversation, you are talking at someone, rather than with someone. If you are in a two-way conversation, participants are both listening and talking. In a competitive conversation, people are more concerned about their own perspective, whereas in a cooperative conversation participants are interested in the perspective of everyone involved. Based on direction and tone, I grouped conversations into four types: debate, dialogue, discourse, and diatribe. Debate is a competitive, two-way conversation. The goal is to win an argument or convince someone, such as the other participant or third-party observers. Dialogue is a cooperative, two-way conversation. The goal is for participants to exchange information and build relationships with one another. Discourse is a cooperative, one-way conversation. The goal to deliver information from the speaker to the listeners. Diatribe is a competitive, one-way conversation. The goal is to express emotions, browbeat those that disagree with you, or inspires those that share the same perspective. To highlight the differences between these types of conversations, let’s use politics as an example: Debate two family members from opposite sides of the political spectrum arguing over politics. Dialogue two undecided voters talking to each other about the candidates, trying to figure out who they want to vote for. Discourse a professor giving a lecture on international affairs. Diatribe a disgruntled voter venting about the election’s outcome. It is important to know which type of conversation you are in, because that determines the purpose of that conversation. If you can identify the purpose, you can better speak to the heart of that conversation. But, if you misidentify the conversation you are in, you can fall into conversational pitfalls. Here are a few examples of conversational pitfalls I’ve written about talking at, not with the problem of disconnected conversations sometimes your dialogue might actually be two separate discourses instead will you recognize that in time? When arguing over value issues, sometimes facts and truth don’t matter sometimes people just want to diatribe, what can you do when that happens, especially when you want to have a dialogue or debate? If someone appears to be in a conversational pitfall, you can help them climb back out.[6] Regardless of how one climbs back out, the solution always starts with identifying which hole you are in. You must first know the problem before you can find the solution. And, sometimes, just identifying the pitfall itself is enough to draw attention to the problem and correct the conversation. When you are in a conversation, take a moment to think about which conversation you are actually in. Each of the types of conversation are meaningless on their own; you give them meaning in their use. And, ultimately, it is up to you to decide what type of conversation you want to be part of. Many learners need controlled speaking practice, and using scripted dialogues helps them gain confidence. If you use course book dialogues or similar conversations as a starting point this can give students, confidence - they do not have to strain to understand new items or words reinforcement - a chance to review and reuse the functional language presented by their teacher. It also gives you a useful source of material in an emergency. Mix up two short conversations and ask students to unscramble them. Students then choose one to perform. Put pieces of a short dialogue on five or so slips of paper. Each student in the group reads their slip of paper without showing it to anyone. Students have to decide what the correct order is. Ask students to decide if they might have a reply to a question, for example. Put pieces of a longer dialogue, or several shorter dialogues, on different slips of paper. Ask students to mingle, reading out their slip. If they meet a person who seems to have a part of their sequence they can form a couple. Set a time limit and walk around listening. Decide when to stop the activity and then put students in pairs or small groups. Ask them to reconstruct what they think the dialogue is about. This can lead to different interpretations and lots of creative thinking to fill in gaps. Remind them that there is no right answer! Create artificial raindrops, coffee spills or smudges on dialogues so that some words are unreadable or half missing. It works best if you use a bigger font size than usual. Ask students to try to guess from the context what the missing words are. Blank out key grammatical items in the dialogue which students need extra practice on, such as prepositions, auxiliaries, etc. Ask students to fill in the missing words. If you are typing or writing out the dialogue, increase the level of difficulty by not leaving spaces where the missing words are, so they have to identify when something is missing as well as what it is. Put the class into two groups. Ask one half to focus on making notes of any key words and expressions they hear, and the other half to focus on making notes that summarise what the dialogue is about.[7] After you have played or read out the dialogue, put students into pairs or small groups one or two students from each half of the class and ask them to try to reconstruct the dialogue and act it out. Dictate only one side of the dialogue. Then give students time to write ideas for what the other person in the dialogue might say. Emphasise that it is up to their imagination and there is no correct answer. Then put students in pairs to work out a dialogue using their pooled notes. Take out key words from a dialogue, then mix them up and put them back in the wrong places. Ask students to try to work out which words have been moved around. Misspell some of the key words in a dialogue and ask students to try to spot the mistakes. Focus on key items you want to revise. If you have been reading any stories with your class, ask students to imagine a key conversation between characters in a specific part of the story. This gives them a framework. If you have listened to any songs in English with your class where the singer is addressing the song to someone, ask students to imagine the conversation the singer and that person have after that person has heard the song. Find a TV advert that has a dialogue. Play it with the sound off, and ask students to brainstorm a dialogue and write the script in small groups. Then watch the original to compare. Identify a topic based on your course content and fill out a dialogue request form. A dialogues program facilitator will contact you to arrange a brief consultation in person or by phone. The pre-dialogue consultation gives you an opportunity to discuss your learning objectives with the facilitator and identify specific questions you want the dialogue to address.
Prepare your students for the dialogue. Students benefit most when a pre-dialogue reading, class discussion, or assignment connects to the topic/questions the dialogue will address. Plan to share ideas for preparing your students with the facilitator during the pre-dialogue consultation. Facilitators will use this information to help build a “road map” for your dialogue. Keep in mind that the facilitator will guide the conversation during the dialogue. In a dialogue, faculty members drop the teacher role. All dialogue community participants act as co-learners. When teaching children monologue, it is suggested to use types of monologue. First, if you want your students to improve their self-confident they need speak themselves in front of a mirror by explaining a theme.[8] That is called Soliloquy type of monologue. But if your learner need to speak to the audience or among the class. It is required Dramatic Monologue. Outside the classroom, an enormous amount of what we learn is learned through dialogue. Yet within the classroom, the dominant mode of speech is monologue. Lying behind this is an assumption that the point of a lesson is to transmit information from the teacher the expert to the student who knows little or nothing. Yet we learn by interpreting what we hear in the light of our own prior experience and interests. We cannot, therefore, treat students simply as passive receivers of our wisdom, if we want them genuinely to learn. Moreover, many topics of discussion have no obviously right answer, and more than one way of thinking about them is possible. Things that the students have to say can be genuinely illuminating. We have to take their ideas seriously if we are to enable deep, genuine learning. Moreover, if we can create an environment in the classroom where they appreciate that their ideas will be respected and listened to, whilst still being open to be challenged, we will have begun to create the conditions under which they can begin to learn by making sense of things for themselves, and this will lead to deeper understanding, and hence more secure, integrated, grounded knowledge. Outreach dialogues are held outside of classes and respond to campus or community issues people want to address through dialogue. These dialogues foster sharing of experiences and perspectives among community members around a specific topic of concern to the community members and provide a way to open up conversation about civic concerns on and off campus. Dialogue participants are invited to speak from their own experiences, share their perspectives with one another and listen to the experiences and perspectives of others. While participants may have very different viewpoints on an issue, the dialogue process itself is deliberately non-polarized. It seeks to broaden a participants' awareness and deepen their understanding of complex problems and issues through open communication across social and cultural differences and or power differentials. Dialogue is a form of communication that goes beyond ordinary conversation. Dialogue can defuse the polarization that characterizes much public discourse and generate understanding that can transform individuals, communities and institutions. In this course, students will examine models of dialogic communication and theories of intergroup relations and consider how the practice of dialogue can build deeper understanding of self and others, reinvigorate democratic values and foster a more just and equitable society. Students in this course will develop leadership skills through learning about and practicing dialogue across difference in a collaborative classroom environment. Through hands-on experience participating in, observing, and leading dialogue students will learn how to facilitate dialogues among their peers in a variety of campus and community settings. The course provides practical facilitation training that equips students to be change-makers in any setting - at, in their home communities, or in future workplace and community environments.