Chit Chat
Teacher gives out small cards each of which has somebody's name and some of their "properties" e.g., job, marital status, age etc.
Then teacher gives out another card with many of the properties on it. The sts then mingle to find the name of the person who has each set of properties. This is the GOAL of the activity.
Lots of vocab to preteach: jobs, hobbies and four English cities. Plus some adjectives. It's a lot. Pronunciation essential. As well, students need the functional language to obtain the answers.
This map could be used for the English cities that are referred to.
This is an Elementary communication game from the book by Jill Hadfield.
Short link for this page:
http://bit.ly/maelt_chitchat
Expanded Procedure
In its present form there is no scene setting. It's up to the teacher to suggest in what situation such a diverse group of people might be chatting.
In Procedure 1, students and teachers work first with pictures of jobs, then with pictures of activities, a.k.a. hobbies. In Procedure 2, the class divides and the two lexical areas are worked on at same time.
Procedure 1
Pictures of people doing jobs around the wall. There is a folder attached below with pictures that could be used in this activity. You can see the same pics here in Google images folder.
Ask sts in small groups to write the job names of 5 of them on cards before they leave their seats. Then they can go and stick them under the pics - they can negotiate. Teacher provides whatever is missing.
Pron: Students take the job cards and put them on the board in columns according to the number of syllables each job has. And move them again according to which syllable is stressed. For example:
In addition to the vocabulary of jobs and activities, discussed here on the right, Hadfield includes the very important functional language the students will need to play the game. She recommends:
What's your name?
Where do you live?
How old are you?
Are you married?
How many children have you got?
What do you do?
Do you like ...-ing?
She includes What are your hobbies, but this is not a question you are likely to hear a NS of English say.
If the students will not be too fatigued by pre-teaching, the se questions could be word order activities, e.g.,
live do you where
you are old how
Responses: how do we respond to answers, and when the interview is over? In this case:
Thank you. That's exactly what I needed to know.
You've been very helpful.
No, I'm looking for someone else.
Thank you. I'm going to ask someone else now.
As there are quite a few English towns and cities mentioned, it might be appropriate to show a map at some stage. The one on the left is from a webpage, Townscape Character, tho it does not have all those mentioned in the activity.
Then there is a list of hobbies to deal with:
tennis football gardening swimming sailing guitar knitting cooking drink talking judo woodwork painting crosswords piano reading art pottery
The teacher needs to decide which of these need to be taught. All will be recycled. Once again there is a folder attached below with pictures that could be used in this activity. You can see the same pics here in this Google images folder.
Procedure 2
Divide the students into two groups. If you have more than 20 students, the two groups might also be divided into two subgroups. Group 1 can work with the JOBS pictures while Group 2 can work with the ACTIVITIES pictures.
Working with pictures can mean matching them with vocabulary cards which would ideally include not only nouns, but collocating verbs and possibly adjectives as well.
The end
The goal of the activity is to find the names of all the people on the card. With all those pictures, the students could match the jobs with the activities that the people perform.
Modify and Adapt
as Hadfields suggests, the original cards could be personalised for people in the class or known people.
And there is no reason not to an activity twice - the first time as is, the second time personalised.