Thongsook College BA TESOL Teaching Tips: Using dialogues in class

Providing students with spoken accuracy and fluency practice.

“A good dialogue can lead to different teaching points, including vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. It can provide students with an opportunity to practice and remember set phrases or useful chunks of language. It can help a teacher keep a large group effectively busy for an entire class. Finally, if students are encouraged to change the dialogue to match their world and interests, they have a chance to practice fluency.”

Timothy Cornwall, PhD

I often use longer, two-person dialogues with at least eight or more turns for each speaker. With a good dialogue, I can go through a number of useful lesson stages and conduct different learning tasks. In addition, whether a class is large (60+), small (15 to 20), or only two or three, I can easily adapt my repertoire of tasks and adjust my expectations.

Listening

Once students have a basic idea about the dialogue practice they will be doing, I play it once or twice in its entirety with books closed. While I might do some pre-listening questioning, I often only offer a vague idea as to its content.

As I know they will understand it completely by the end of the class; I want them to feel a bit intimidated at first. An initial student concern that something is too difficult, later replaced with complete understanding, can help to build their confidence.

Before moving to the next stage, I ask basic questions about the dialogue to make certain students have a global understanding. Depending on the number of participants, answers are given chorally or individually. This stage will give me a basic idea as to whether the dialogue is easy or difficult.

If the dialogue appears to match or push them to a reasonable level based on their abilities, we go through line by line. After listening to each line, students repeat as much as they can – from one word to the entire utterance, if possible. Once we have gone through it, I play it again before I distribute a copy or ask students to open their books.

Ensuring Understanding

As soon as they have opened their books or have a copy, I play the dialogue again and ask them to read. If it is a bit long, I might play it twice. I want them to read as they listen, so I insist they do not use their finger or pen to guide them.

We then go through the dialogue, line-by-line, with students repeating my cue. If a sentence or turn is long, I divide it into parts. If they do not understand a vocabulary item or a grammatical structure, we stop to review it before moving on. It is important that they understand the dialogue at the word, phrase, sentence, and global level. 

Controlled Practice

I then begin to work with pronunciation, especially sounds that cause trouble with phrase or sentence intonation. With particularly useful or difficult phrases and sentences, I use backward build-up. That is, I have students repeat after me, but I start with the last word in the sentence. This practice offers students more practice with natural sentence intonation.

Once students are comfortable with the content and all their questions are answered, they practice. When practicing dialogues in pairs, I insist they follow a ‘read, look up, and speak’ (r-l-s) pattern.

When students practice r-l-s, they are encouraged to say as much as they can remember – from one word to an entire sentence. It is up to them, but usually, with practice over time, the amount increases. However, it is especially important that when they speak, they have eye contact with their partner.

When they understand the idea, I ask them to practice 1,000 times or until they are told to stop. This way, everyone needs to continue practicing. With ‘read, look-up and speak’, the pause between the quiet read and speaking gives short-term memory time to process the content.

Once they have practiced a few minutes following the r-l-s pattern and depending on the dialogue, I ask them to vary how they speak: i.e., high or deep voice, slowly or quickly, happily or angrily. On other occasions, and to reflect more natural English, I ask students to overlap the last word from one person’s role with the first word of the next person’s role.

Once they have practiced the different roles a few times, I ask one person to turn over their paper. The first few times I do this, panic sets in, but most students can make a good attempt. A few minutes later, I switch; later both close their books.

Fluency Practice

Before students try to repeat the dialogue without their books, I tell them I know it will be difficult and that they will make changes. If time and dialogue permit, I review it again, pointing out parts that would be dropped in ‘natural conversation’ and adding conversation fillers – ‘well’, ‘okay,’ ‘uhm, to make it sound more natural.

I want students to make changes, as they have different names than those used in the dialogue, live in a different city, and like and do different things. Depending on the core purpose, they can change as much as possible to match their world, but at the same time, continue to use whatever grammar, functions, and vocabulary are important in this lesson.

The time it takes to complete the exercise can vary. However, in most cases, a selected dialogue can require up to 40 minutes to complete. More importantly, if I monitor them carefully, which is made easier as they must be continually looking down to read and looking up to speak, the amount of time spent practicing or speaking English increases.

Dr Tim Cornwall has been teaching EFL for over 45 years. He is currently a faculty member of the Thongsook College International Program BA TESOL. He can be reached via email at dr.tim@thongsook.college.

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