Have you ever had the students pretend to be objects rather than
people? Mario Rinvolucri has a roleplay in Grammar Games, I think,
where they are pieces of furniture which have to be arranged in a
room. I did it once and it was OK, but not a great hit perhaps.
I remember one guy saying how the kids in a children's class tore
the classroom apart when he had them pretend to be the parts of
the train in the Little Red Engine, and when he read the story
the parts of the train ran to the board, or something. Some sort
of relay thing I think.
My students got pretty excited too by this. I've forgotten what
the concepts were on the role cards. Something from a reading
passage. But I never was able to get them to discuss the
relationships. They just enjoyed answering the quiz questions.
I've been having the same problem with roleplaying of people with
my students for homework. They work out each other's names and
relationships in Chinese before the taping, and then on tape read
out their role cards, do no further talking and then answer the M/C's
questions.
To combat this, in each group, I have two teams, and the team with
the most answers wins, but there appears to be collusion between
M/C's and teams. The M/Cs hand out the role plays before the
taping, I think.
Actually, it is getting better now. I think they are starting to
realize that this is how the final is going to be too. So,
foregoing the preparation in Chinese may be the easier course.
But I want to work on roleplaying of objects rather than people.
The problem is my students don't have an abstract bone in their
body.
Roleplaying is used by programming teams to work out the
relationships between the 'objects' in computer programs,
as part of the process of systems analysis. CRC cards are handed
out with on them, eg:
Class: Loan
Responsibilities: Manage the details of a loan
Collaborators: Display, CompanyDetails, CashAccount
Class: CashAccount
Responsibilities: Manage the cash for the company
Collaborators: Loan, CompanyDetails, Machine, Display
Each person roleplays a class (object)'s responsibilities in
the system, by discussion resolving the interactions that take
place between them.
I'd like to be able to do this with my learners, but perhaps it
is too ambitious. I will probably stick with role playing of
people in controversial situations, but make the questions I ask
ones which require discussion of the concepts involved, like,
'What should Phil do? Tell his boss, or talk to Glen?'
At the moment, I am only asking what their names are, and how
they are related. This is good because I can use M/C questions to
grade the answers.
I guess in Phil's situation I could have a distractor which is not an
alternative Phil could take, eg have Glen tell Phil.
This connects to the jigsaw activity in cooperative learning.
With more advanced students, I liked using All Sides of the Issue
(Alemany Press). The four in each team had separate information,
eg the view of a bus company, that of a company manager enforcing
unobserved transfer rules, that of a bus driver, and that of the
parent of a boy forced to walk home because he was unaware of the
transfer rules.
--
Greg Matheson
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