All in the family . . .

So, today's speaking activity went well, in my opinion. Hopefully it will be helpful to you as well!

All in the family . . . 

Groups of 4-5 students
Upper beginner/Lower intermediate
20-25 minutes
handout

This activity was designed for my speaking class that needs to be able to speak about culture for roughly 3 minutes for their midterm in a few weeks. The classes I am teaching are all repeating this level and topic, so they've spoken about culture quite a bit already and were a little disappointed to find out they had to do it again. But, this activity put a new spin on culture, and I think they enjoyed it.

1. I split the students into groups of four or five and gave them all name-tags (father, mother, son, daughter). I then explained to all of the groups that they are families and I would give them a scenario which they would then discuss as a family and after 2 minutes they would explain to me their answers.

2. I handed out the scenarios (i.e. The daughter is getting married next week.) The scenario was accompanied with 3 questions to discuss (i.e. How do you feel? What is important to do this week? What will be different after the wedding?)

3. The students had 2 minutes to discuss the questions together before I stopped them and called randomly on students to tell me their answer. This allows you to find out how a father would react to a scenario differently than a daughter or son would.

My students enjoyed this activity, and I just kept handing out new scenarios. One twist I threw in was with one class, after we had done a couple of scenarios, I gave them the daughter is getting married and the son is getting married. Because the groups were big to begin, I had them choose a daughter and son from the families that broke off and became a new family to work together. Next, I gave all three families the scenario that they were going to have a baby. This gave me quite some insights to the culture surrounding a grandchild! I had the two fathers arguing over what they would name the grandchild!

The downside to this activity is that it is difficult to monitor their L1 usage, but I liked the activity because it gave almost every student a good amount of speaking time.

Hope it helps!