2.1.3 Using the theory of PPP model to lead the activity of talking role play in the classes.
Some experts of PPP cycle said that the ideal study environment should follow this graph.
PPP Presentation Of single ‘new’ item Practice Of new item: drills, exercise, and dialogue practice Production Activity, role play or task to encourage ‘free’ use of language
(A Course in English Language Teaching, 2006:32)
We can find it includes 3 main points. Now we used this PPP cycle to lead an activity of talking role- play in Section A Unit 1 from Go for It in Tang Hu Middle School Class14 Grade1 on October 20th, 2009.
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-------- My name is Jenny. -------I’m Gina. Nice to meet you! -------What’s your name? ------- Alan.
-------Hello, I’m Mary.
--------Hi, Mary. I’m Jim. (From Unit 1 in Go for It on Page1)
Step 1, the teacher gives students a self-introduction. (Presentation) Teacher: My name is Sally. Nice to meet you! Students: Nice to meet you, too.
During the first step, the teacher presents today’s teaching material. Although many students have already known today’s teaching material, the teacher will also give some simple introductions to more single students to motivate students to use it. And then teacher guides students to read the conversations.
Step 2, the teacher let students do some controlled dialogue practice by pair work or group work. (Practice)
A: My name is…. B: I’m….Nice to meet you. A: Nice to meet you, too.
The second step is to practise today’s teaching material and know the contents about today’s material by doing.
Step 3, the teacher gives students free time to find new friends in our class in English. (Production)
At this step, students have free time to use English language to help them find new friends in our classroom. But they must learn to produce new sentences to get more information by our former knowledge.
From this typical lesson, we can see role-play talking activities can be one part of PPP model. On the other hand, every talking activity should be based on a situation, so that students can use new knowledge naturally to reach the final goal of the teaching by talking role-play.
2.2. The second main form of role-play ----interview.
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2.2.1 Training the students’ initiative skills.
The second main form of role-play the writer wants to discuss is interview. The word interview has two meanings: the first one is a reporter, which asks somebody questions in order to find out his views; the other one is a meeting at which somebody is asked questions to find out if he/she is suitable (e.g. Somebody applying for a job)(OXFORD Advanced Learners’ English-Chinese Dictionary, 2006:926). For these two meanings of interview, we can divide it into two main role-play activities of interview.
For the first activity, we can suppose a situation which a superstar like Jay will take a meeting with journalists. We can choose one of the students to act as Jay, and others act as the journalists. It will be an attractive topic for students. They may ask a large number of questions and even give us some unexpected questions or answers. If they want to change roles, we can give the chance to other students to act as popular stars.
The other activity of interview is job interview. It is a formal situation for people, so we should take more attention. Here is an interview for judging. Three interviewers are applying for a secretary in a company. One is young, just out of school. One is an elder with many years’ experience. The third one is beauty but no education. The principle, judgers will interview one at a time (others leave the room), in order to decide which one is best suited for the position. Each of them will try hard to convince the principle that she/he is best for the job. In our class, we can choose three students to act as interviewers, others act as judgers. Every interviewer takes a self introduction and then judgers raise some questions. Because the teacher doesn’t give students some information, so students must do it by discussion and imagination. There is no limited, there is only imagination. Students are allowed to come up with questions freely. At last, students will give us a result by their discussion and decision.
According to the two role-play interview activities, we can find students finish a set of small tasks in every way. So it is easy to connect Task-based Approach with the role-play interview. Let’s discuss what the relationship between them in theory is as follows
2.2.2 The teaching theory of TBLT and interview.
The Task-based Approach to learn a language is to emphasize on learning to communicate through purposeful interaction in the target language. For China, Zhou Xueya points out the
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Tasked-based Teaching will completely change the traditional grammar-based teaching methods in China. “He also holds out the important points of Tasked-based Teaching: the key of task-design, the core of activity-design, the prerequisite of instructors’ guiding” (Zhou Xueya, 2007:01). It is easy to get the aim of the Tasked-based Approach is “task”. The task has four main components: a purpose, a context, a process, a product (Clark and Scarino Brownnell, 1994:28).
