#3970. Role Taking

, level: all
Posted Fri Jun 24 11:00:13 PDT 2011 by AJ (AJ).

For long teaching sentences, I showed the students some pictures about people doing things in different contexts. Sometimes I used technology to grasp the students' attention. After that, I gave them dialogues related to the pictures to read. One of the most interesting things in English Language is intonation. In Arabic, we don't use too many intonations, which makes using intonation in English so challenging and relatively new. To make it easier, I brought different pictures and characters (I created these characters; I stuck some faces on cartoons, cut two wholes for eyes and attached wooden sticks so students would be able to hold them). I picked two students, let them choose the characters and read after me emphasizing on the stressed syllables and focused on intonation in the reading. After that the students read the dialogue by themselves. Students loved role-taking activity and liked the idea of hiding their faces behind those masks. The masks motivated them to participate more in the reading activity because they were comfortable to stand in front of the class. This activity increased the students' self-efficacy to reach the emotional arousal stage.