Story-telling can fire the imagination and help students to forget that they are speaking in a second language.
Aim
To develop students' ability to speak fluently and confidently.
You need
A selection of pictures, approximately one for every student in your class. They can be of anything at all: picture cards of objects, clothes, places etc., or pictures cut out from magazines. The activity tends to work better if the pictures are interesting or attractive in some way.
Procedure
1. |
|
Put the students into small groups and give each group a few, randomly selected pictures. |
| |
|
|
| 2. |
|
Ask them to create a story which involves all the pictures you have given them in as natural and convincing a way as possible. They don't need to write it down, but they may want to take notes for themselves. Set a time limit (e.g. 5/10 minutes). |
| |
|
|
| 3. |
|
Go around the class helping where necessary and encouraging them to be as imaginative as possible. |
| |
|
|
| 4. |
|
The groups now split up. One member from each group stays to tell the story and the other members of each group go and listen to another group's story. After a few minutes, change story-tellers. |
| |
|
|
| 5. |
|
To involve the listeners more, you can ask them to try and guess what pictures the group telling the story had. If you want to, you can allocate points for the number of pictures correctly guessed. |
|
What a story!