View Content #26838

This Activity of the Week is inspired by and adapted from Thorny Games’ Dialect. It is appropriate for all proficiency levels of language learners and is included to showcase how play can promote and involve language use throughout a school year.

Learning objectives: Students will be able to:

• Construct an identity and communicate it in the target language
• Explore ways in which language is shaped and informed by identity

Mode: Interpersonal

Materials: Reality Construction Handout

Procedure:

1. Put your students in teams of 4-6 players. Begin by creating a world in which the characters your students will play interact. To construct this world, learners will need to decide:
   1. How they are connected? (Are they a family? A team of explorers? A band of thieves?)
   2. When and where are they located? (Is it the future? The present? In a big city? On a remote island?)
   3. What is their goal as a group? (Is it to plan a party? Execute a heist? Find a hidden treasure?)
2. Provide your students with the cards on the first page of the Reality Construction Handout, and instruct them to read the card in silence and ask any clarifying questions they might have. These cards will inform the next step.
3. Learners will fill out the first part of page 2 of the Reality Construction Handout. This step should take no more than 5 minutes.
4. Learners will share the information for Questions 1-4. They will only reveal the information to Question 5 as gameplay continues.
5. Inform learners that they will engage in a roleplay discussion of one of the scenarios provided on page 2 of the Reality Construction document. Before they can engage in said roleplay, they have to 1) work together to decide on the blank information in the scenario templates and 2) decide how each of their characters will need to act/react in the situation by answering the character planning questions (page 3 of the Reality Construction Handout) privately.
6. Learners engage in the role play experience(s).
7. At the end of each role play, which can and should be conducted at various points throughout the school year, learners should document their experience in a journal. This journal should inform a final project like the creation of a photo album for their constructed reality, a series of newspaper articles that document their journey, or even a short film.

Notes:

• In Step 1, teachers should take care to adapt this discussion to proficiency levels of the students. For example, advanced students could operate solely from guiding questions, while novice students should have lists of options to help them make their selections and sentence stems to support any debate that may arise.
• In Step 5, teachers of novice students may need to provide some concrete options from which they can choose.
• Also related to Step 5, teachers should feel free to progress through the scenarios in the way that most closely aligns with curricular needs and content.
• Learners, particularly Novice and Intermediate Low learners, will likely find it useful to outline the roleplays before engaging in them. Teachers are encouraged to allow this type of scaffolding but to avoid situations in which learners write scripts. If the teachers wish for learners to engage in Presentational Writing instead of Interpersonal Communication, step 6 could instead be a script writing step.