Speaking Course Project: Keeping Up the Conversation
The idea behind Keeping Up the Conversation is for students to develop fluency more than being gramatically correct (although gramatical accuracy doesn't hurt). Here are a couple of variations on this concept:
- Think of a relay race where a student holds an item that symbolizes their turn to talk (a ruler, a nurf ball). They talk for a given period of time and when they pass on the item to another student, that student must pick up the conversation where they left off.
- Another variation of Keeping Up the Conversation includes dialogues between students on a given topic. The students can receive the topic just before their turn (for more spontaneous and natural dialogue) or they could have the topic in advance in order to prepare (good for intermediate level students). The first person to lose the train of thought or pause for more than 10 (or a number of your chosing) seconds has lost the round. This version could also be done in groups of three.
- Tangents, going off topic, and general circumlocution to explain a forgotten vocabulary word or idea are encouraged in this activity.