Content allowing students to engage in ‘real’ communication or simulations of conversations is an overarching language skill development goal. Dialogues, which in turn pave the way for roleplays, provide a rich repertoire of practice activities to nudge your student toward more meaningful, and consequently, less mechanical communication. Regardless of the student’s level of language proficiency, these activities hold relevance for language development.

Dialogues

Dialogues usually present spoken language in a natural or conversational tone. They are beneficial for developing speaking and listening skills. Dialogues are usually exercises for guided, rather than free language practice.

Dialogues can fall into two categories: standard dialogues and open dialogues.

Standard dialogues present students with an A B exchange. They are useful for reading, listening, pronunciation, intonation, and other phonological features.

In open dialogues, the tutor provides only one half of the dialogue with the student creating the other half. Surveys are a perfect and extremely useful example of an open dialogue format and give the student practice in asking and answering questions.

When writing your own dialogues, keep these points in mind:

• Use natural language as much as possible with idiomatic and socio-linguistic phrases relevant to the student’s age and experiences. “Wassup!” may work well with teens, but not so much for retirees.
• Keep the dialogue exchanges short enough so that your student can easily remember, but long enough to provide context. Three to five exchanges with salutations work well.
• A simple dialogue can happen anywhere. Practice circumstances like an emergency or other conflict to provide urgency. Delivering the line, “Where’s my phone?” will be quite different in a supermarket, as opposed to coming upon an accident.
• Depict situations or reasons for a dialogue that are relevant and useful to the learner. Think of how your student needs to use language in their everyday days lives and the situations that they address.
• Allow for more meaningful practice with options for substitution within the dialogue.

Here are some ideas when presenting dialogues:

• Before presenting the dialogue, introduce the topic of the dialogue by fielding your student’s interest or knowledge of the subject. Providing pictures that may accompany or are similar to the dialogue can warm up a student with relevant vocabulary or grammatical structures.
• Have the student listen to the dialogue and explore what they heard. Model the exchange, speaking both parts, so your student hears the exchange before they are asked to participate.
• Give your student only one side of the dialogue and have the student participate in reading and listening.
• Have your student reorder a dialogue that’s been cut up into its individual lines.
• Try out your acting skills and use the dialogue as a telephone conversation where your student only hears one side of the exchange. Who was on the other end of the conversation? Co-worker, teacher, or friend? What questions did they ask?
• Perform the dialogue in fictional circumstances. How does the same dialogue change in a library, as opposed to a crowded store or on a cold day in the park or at a sunny beach?

You may be pleasantly surprised at the willingness of your student to play and the creativity that they will exhibit, if you mine dialogues for expressive and more meaningful practice. Here are some examples:

https://www.eslfast.com/easydialogs/

https://bogglesworldesl.com/Listening/Suggestions10Listening.html

https://www.stickyball.net/esl-dialogues-and-conversation-activities.html

Roleplays

Roleplays, which are often forms of extended dialogues, are part of the inventory of practice activities and materials. As your student becomes more flexible and relies on fewer cues to initiate or carry them through a given dialogue, they are ready to move into roleplaying.

Roleplay is a way of bringing situations from real life into your tutoring session. Your student needs to imagine a role, a context, or both and improvise a conversation. The context is usually determined, but students develop the dialogue as they proceed. This differs from reading a dialogue aloud.

Roleplays can be extensions of more controlled practice using dialogues. After practicing a dialogue, you might develop roleplays based on a parallel situation. A dialogue about buying a shirt could lead into a roleplay about buying a pair of jeans.

Why use roleplays?

• They are fun.
• They help to prepare your student for real-life communication by simulating reality in situations, in unpredictability, and in various roles an individual must play in their own lives. They bridge the gap between tutoring sessions and the world outside tutoring time.
• They can be used for assessment and feedback purposes as you complete a lesson, determining the degree of mastery attained.
• They can consolidate learning and allow the student the opportunity to discover their own level of mastery over specific language content.
• By simulating reality, they allow all levels of students to feel that they are really using the language for a communicative purpose. This contributes to students’ confidence in their ability to use English.
• They provide a means for the student to experiment with language that they have learned. Where a student makes up their own dialogue, it provides a special opportunity to go beyond what has been taught and to draw upon the full range of their language competencies.
• They allow students to express who they are, their sense of humor, and their own personal communication style.
• They offer good listening practice.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMJ0UbcwBJw



Literacy Minnesota offers a wealth of interesting and beneficial resources and welcomes tutors from across the country to engage.

Here are their upcoming webinars. Most are free, yet donations are appreciated.

Naperville Public Library has a collection of English Language Learner (ELL) materials at all three buildings to support people as they learn to read, speak, and write English. There are also materials that can be used by ELL tutors. The ELL collection includes books, audiobooks, and videos, and the library subscribes to Mango Languages, an online resource for learning languages, including English. There are study rooms that are frequently used by tutors, as well as tables throughout the libraries where tutors can meet with students.

Naperville Public Library hosts three English Conversation Groups, which meet on a weekly basis. One gathers on Mondays from 7:00-8:30 p.m. at the 95^th Street Library. Another convenes at the Naper Blvd. Library on Wednesdays from 10:00-11:30 a.m., and the third one meets at Nichols Library on Thursdays from 6:30-8:00 p.m. All three are facilitated by Literacy DuPage volunteers and are geared toward intermediate learners. Registration is not required, and newcomers are always welcome.

Nichols Library, 200 West Jefferson Avenue, Naperville, IL 60540

Naper Blvd. Library, 2035 South Naper Blvd., Naperville, IL 60565

95th Street Library, 3015 Cedar Glade Drive, Naperville, IL 60564

630-961-4100 https://www.naperville-lib.org/



The car seat event is next week. These are brand new car seats, convertible from infant to booster. Families must register with Theresa by e-mail to receive a pick-up time between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 7/19.

Effective July 1, 2024 . . . Click here for the full story.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson