Учебное пособие: The English grammar

If you choose a text for skills work the structures it illustrates well may not be the ones that fit into the structural syllabus of the course the students are following. Bear in mind that particular text-types lend themselves to the presentation of particular structures: for example, simple stories contain the simple past, and a text of someone talking about his or her personal experiences will usually contain natural instances of the present perfect.

Another disadvantage with authentic texts is that they often don’t give you enough examples of the target structure.

Short dialogues

Dialogues are a type of text – a spoken text which we listen to, although for teaching and learning purposes we also look at them in their written or transcribed form. Although they are a type of text, it is worth considering them separately from reading and other listening texts as they are often used as a model for speaking practice of structures.

Dialogues are often used as an alternative, or in addition, to introducing language through visual means, especially with lower level students.

Example

This dialogue could be used with low-level students to introduce the question form and the short answer of the verb to be in the present simple. It also revises Sorry ? as a way of asking for repetition.

At the airport Customs

Customs officer :Is this our bag?

Woman traveler: Sorry?

Customs officer: Is this our bag?

Woman traveler: Yes, it is.

Usually the teacher introduces the characters and the situation through pictures/board drawings and elicitation – Who’s this? Where are they? etc. The understanding of the new language is checked (see p. 138). The students repeat the lines of the dialogue after the teacher and then take turns to play the roles, perhaps in open pairs first, then in closed pairs. It is a generative situation in that new vocabulary items can then be introduced (in this dialogue, for example, suitcase, camera, handbag , etc) and more sentences containing the same structures can be elicited and practised: Is this your suitcase? etc.

When are dialogues useful?

Dialogues are useful from time to time, particularly at elementary level, mainly for the following reasons:

o You can write the dialogue so that it focuses on the language you want to introduce and doesn’t include distractions such as unknown vocabulary.

o You can make the language vivid and memorable, with a clear situation and location, and sharply distinguished characters, often aided by pictures and props.

o Dialogues provide a controlled setting for language items and conversational features.

o They are very useful for introducing language functions. For example, asking the way, at lower levels.

o Dialogues can be used to generate a number of practice sentences. For example, with the dialogue above, the teacher, by using picture prompts, can elicit these questions from students: Is this your suitcase? Is this your camera? and get the same replies from ‘the woman’.

o It is easy to introduce pairwork practice, as the dialogues naturally have two parts. Pairwork practice often begins with repetition/imitation of the ‘model’ dialogue, but often this controlled practice can be followed by freer, more ‘meaningful’ communication. Dialogues lend themselves to information gap activities in which each student in the pair has access to different information which he or she can feed into the dialogue.

o They can be a springboard for more improvised language practice. If the practice tasks can be made more creative and open-ended the students have some degree of choice over what they say. For example, the last sentence of a dialogue can be left open.

Example

This dialogue practises language for making suggestions:

It’s Rosie’s birthday next week. What shall we get her?/What about … (the students choose). That’s a good idea because … or No, because …

A dialogue can often lead into a cued roleplay, such as the one in Task 3 on p. 43. See also Setting up activities on p. 44. Dialogues can also be used to illustrate the different social identity and the relationship between the speakers, and the kind of language they would use. For example, the way you ask a close friend to lend you enough money to buy a cup of coffee would be different from the way you ask a bank manager for a large loan.

What are the disadvantages of using dialogues?

o If dialogues are uncommunicative, predictable and not mixed in with other approaches to presentation they can be boring.

o They are rarely useful of students above elementary level, who benefit from seeing language within a wider context, no in isolated chunks.