role-play

Strangers on a train
This is an excellent activity to promote oral fluency practice & specific language practice at the same time.

Get the students to imagine they are strangers in a train compartment - get them sitting opposite each other in groups of four. Elicit what people usually talk about on the train - the weather, where they are going/coming from etc. Tell them you are going to give them a line to memorise & that it's secret - give them out, students memorise & you take them back in.

Then explain what they have to do - to say their lines as naturally as they can in the conversation without the others guessing it is their line. So they have to direct the conversation so that they can say their line naturally, without the others noticing. They must have one conversation & not split into two as the others will miss their lines when they come to say them.

The lines you give them could contain a language item that you have recently been looking at or off-the-wall sentences (eg. My girlfriend sleeps in the garden). I had to do this in a Spanish lesson when I first started learning the languiage & my line was 'yo tampoco' - 'me neither' - so I had to wait for a negative to say my line.

At the end the students then tell each other what they thought were each others' lines. It's an activity that you can use again & again & it's lots of fun!