My Favorite Activity

I've taught mostly Oral English in my time in China and over all the semesters teaching it I've done a lot of different activities. Some have gone over well with the students and some flopped pretty much immediately, but one stands out as my favorite by far. The idea wasn't mine originally, I got it from Dave's ESL Cafe, which has some great suggestions for TEFL class activities, even ideas I don't like from there I often adapt into something that would work with my class. I start out with having them sit next to another person in the class, usually in columns, if I have a classroom where I can move the desks I might but them in a two concentric circles. Then I have them come up with imaginary people. I tell them to come up with a name, an age, a job, a hobby, a goal, and some story about their imaginary person. I used to have them just do this in their heads but some students won't really do it so now I have them write it down. Half the class is assigned to make men and half the class women. Once they have finished I try and explain the idea of speed dating to them. I tell them that they are going to pretend to be the people they just created and go on a short "date" with the person next to them. I use my cell phone as a stopwatch and tell them to go on this "date" for four or five minutes. I'm not sure exactly why but even in class where people tend to speak too much Chinese they keep almost entirely to English for this activity. I think it might have something to do with the embarrassment factor of being on a "date" with their classmate so they feel more comfortable pretending to be there people they created and keeping that illusion up by talking in English. I usually walk around and listen to make sure that everyone is talking in English but I rarely have to correct anyone during this activity.

After the allotted time is up I make some sort of buzzer noise and tell them to switch partners, I usually tell them to move in a circle so that each "man" will eventually talk to each "woman." For the next round I slightly decrease the amount of time they have to talk to their next "date." I found that decreasing the time is really important since it keeps the game from getting dull or losing its energy. By the end they have so little time they are basically shouting at each other. I've boys run to their next partner and yell something like, "Hello, my name is Jane! Who are you?" With bigger classes, I did this yesterday with a class of 38 it take pretty much the whole 90 minutes to do all of this. Smaller classes are faster but it still takes a while. In the end the students end up talking basically nonstop for the entire class period. They also find the whole thing pretty funny and I see a lot of people laughing every time I do it. It's also is one of the easier activities for me since all I have to do is tell them to switch every few minutes. I like this activity so much I find myself saving it for later in the semester since once I've done it I don't have anything quite as good.