This week, with my co-teacher, the students were reading about a famous Korean novel Toji, which translates into 'The Land'. In my speaking class, I decided to continue the theme of Korean stories and wanted them to retell some traditional Korean fairy tales in English.
I chose three fairy tales that they were familiar with:
I made three groups and then let one person from each group choose a coloured hat that contained six pictures from one of the fairy tales. The groups then had to order the pictures to tell the story correctly and afterwards we checked their solutions together.
It was then time for each group to designate which person would play which character and to come up with a script. I would be recording their final performances using an audio recorder and judging them according to the following criteria:
A prize
was offered for the best performance in each of the three fairy tales. This
provided a little extrinsic motivation and as well as this, I asked them to
think of some intrinsic motivating factors. They suggested (with a little
encouragement) - wanting to share their culture and history with a foreigner,
wanting to read the stories to their children when they were older, having some
fun, learning some specific vocabulary related to the stories and just
generally practising their English.
The groups were then given around fifteen minutes to prepare and practise their performance. I encouraged them not to write a script but to just jump-in and try to speak about it from memory. In my experience, writing a script always consumes too much of their time and not enough is then spent on producing effective speech.
Finally, I gave them the audio recorder, sent them to a quiet room and left them to it. The results were varied but the students by-and-large, were very creative adding sound effects, narration and altering their voices to suit the character they were playing.
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