Student Skills Group 3: The verb “to be,” present tense, present progressive, adjectives, possessive pronouns, family members
- Role-play: Two college roommates meet for the first time in their dorm room. They greet each other, exchange phone numbers, email addresses, and discuss what classes they are taking each day of the week.
- Reenact a conversation between a university student and his/her advisor. The advisor will ask the student which classes s/he is taking and on which days + any extra activities/organizations s/he is participating in. This allows for practice of formal and informal registers.
- Role-play a phone conversation between two friends. One friend is studying abroad and the other friend is still at home. The friend at home is interested to know about what the other friend is doing in the new country. What is his/her class schedule like, where does s/he go everyday? What does s/he eat everyday? etc.
- Role-play a phone conversation between two students discussing what they are doing in that current moment.
- Using identity cards role-play a conversation between guests at a dinner party. Each person will be asked to introduce him/herself, what s/he does for a living, where s/he is from, how many language s/he speaks what are his/her hobbies etc.
- Discuss family trees and describe the different family members of the tree using different descriptive adjectives.
- Ask for each person in the session to describe him/herself using descriptive adjectives.
- Bring the family tree of a famous family in popular culture and ask for the familial relationships between the members of the family. You can choose a famous family in American popular culture or a famous family in the target language’s popular culture. Be sure to create the family tree so that the different relationships are easily understood.
- Ask how each person normally celebrates his/her birthday (this requires use of the present tense).
- Ask each person to describe one of his/her good friends. What is his/her name? What does s/he look like? What is his/her personality like? What does s/he study?
- An interview between two people:
a. Where are you from?
b. What languages do you speak?
c. What are you studying?
d. Where do you attend school?
If you have more than one participant in the session, ask for each participant to present the person s/he interviewed.
- Role-play a conversation between two students deciding on where to go for lunch, when to meet and where they will meet.
- Bring in pictures of different celebrities and ask for them to be described using descriptive adjectives.
