• Granlund
• Boniface

Warm-up. To get into the mood of English and setting the scene for the role play situation a video about travelling agencies is shown. After the watching there is a short reflection on the main issues of the news item.

The next step is to ask the Students if they want to play a role play – a conversation between a customer and a travel agent. Everybody is eager to do it.

Challenge 1. Let’s do the role play!

I choose two volunteers and they start a dialogue. After the first sentences

 – Hello!- Hello! –I want to travel to France. –Well, how do you want to travel? –Well, it doesn’ t matter, the main thing – cheap. -Ok, do you want to travel with stops? –Well... 

...here, after less than 30 seconds the conversation stopped. So, the Students agreed that the role play failed.

The question raises – what do we need for a successful role play? Some of the Students suggest – a role card where there is some information to speak about.

Challenge 2. Students are divided into two groups and one group is asked to write role cards for a customer and the second group is asked to write  role cards for the travel agent. After five minutes the work is done.

I choose one from six suggested role cards for the customer and one from six suggested role cards for the travel agent and two volunteers start the role play.

The Students are given a short time to get acquinted with the role card and the conversation starts. This time it lasts almost a minute but there a lot of  breaks and pauses in the conversation and the students are not very satisfied with the information contained and they agree that the style of the role card – just points mentioned, e.g. want to go on honeymoon, somewhere warm, in May, etc. – does not help to get the idea of the character they are playing and it’s hard to use their imagination to catch the mood of the role play.

At this moment there is a 10 minutes break and the students have a short rest.

When the students return from the break I give them two reading tasks where they have to match the described persons with offered travel packages and the described persons with different hotels. After ten minutes the tasks are done and the answers checked.

The next step is to evaluate the descriptions given in the task and students come to a conclusion that their style is better for role cards as the ones they made.

The students are asked to sit in two groups – those who wrote customer cards and those who wrote travel agents’ cards and each group has to put together all the information of their descriptions and compare them with the reading task descriptions and are asked to and find the features which could help to write a good role card. As I know that this is an upper intermediate level group and we have already done done groupin tasks I suggest them to discuss the features and come to parameters.

After ten minutes each group calls out the parameters and I get the following list.

The last task – based on the parameters I wrote down on the Interactive board the students are asked to write the second version of a role card, this time they have to stay in the groups and with some discussion within the group to check that they choose to describe different places to offer as travel agents and different personalities to describe as customers.

Here are the descriptions (...it will be added later)  I got and we  are going to test them next lesson.

I have to remind once more that this was the upper-intermediate group and I am really anxious to see what the lower intermediate group is going to develop within these task framework...