Fun Dialogue Activity

Fun Dialogue Activity

An easy way to make writing dialogues fun and memorable for your ESL students.

The most common way to teach material in an English class goes like this.

1. Explain the new stuff.
2. Easy practice with the new stuff.
3. Free practice with the new stuff.

Easy Practice is stuff like fill-in-the-blank or matching exercises. It’s simple. Even students with a shaky understanding of the material should be able to succeed.

Free practice is harder. The students practice using the material in a way that mimics how they might use it in the real world. This is a very important stage to reach. If all they’ve ever done is fill-in-the-blank worksheets, they’re not going to succeed on the mean streets.

One of the best, and most popular, ways to do free practice is by having the students write dialogues.

Here’s a way to spice up dialogue creation. They’ll be useful, personal, memorable, and funny.

First, ask the students for two celebrities. Then, ask them for a city, a place in that city, a season, the time of day, and why the two celebrities are meeting. You should end up with something like this on your board:

Lady Gaga and Barack Obama

London

A restaurant

Winter

11:00a.m.

To tell a secret

Now, the students should write the dialogue. In it, they should use the grammar or vocabulary you’ve been working on in class. (For example: “Use the Present Perfect five times.” or “Use the 10 new vocabulary words in your dialogue.”) Guaranteed great learning.