Duck Gaga
Gaga is a little duck. He is small, dirty and ugly. His friends don’t like to play with him. One day, Gaga walked behind his friends quietly. But his friends did not want him. Gaga was very sad and ran to the river and cried loudly。
Just then, a big beautiful bird heard him crying and flew down. She said, “Please don’t cry. Tell me, what do you want? I can help you.”
Gaga told the truth. The beautiful bird said, “OK, I can help you to become a good-looking duck.” Then she took out a blanket and put it on the duck’s body. She said
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something which the little duck didn’t understand. Then she took away the blanket. There stood a good-looking duck.
Gaga was very happy. He thanked the big bird and quickly went to play with his friends.
From this tale the teacher divides students into some groups. And let every group show out this story. One student acts as Gaga, 2 students act as Gaga’s friends, and one student acts as the beautiful bird. During the preparation, the teacher can give them some suggestions, but not tell them how to play. The students in the middle school are in the age of motivating others, so this kind of playing not only can attract students’ interesting, but also stimulate Ss’ learning motivation by showing out these interesting roles.
2.3.2 Improving the students’ creativity by making some shows by their thoughts.
This is a challenge task for students. They must do everything about shows by themselves. During the preparation, they can ask the teacher for help, but the teacher should not give them ready-made dialogue to learn. We should point out that, for the free role- play activities, it is a good idea to choose situations which are not exactly the same as those in the text-book, but which are based on the general topics. These topics will be familiar to the students, and they will be able to use the language they have learnt. The teacher may give some topics such as health, education, free time, family and so on. And the students can choose any one and then think of suitable situation for free role play. For example:
Topic 1: health
Possible situation: You got a cough, and you must to look doctor, but you don’t know where the hospital is. You should ask one people to find the hospital. Topic 2: school
Possible situation: There are some new students in your school. And the teacher asks you to be their guide. You should guide them to visit your school and answer their any questions.
Then the teacher asks students to play the free role-play they have thought about. The contents about role- play should not be based on our text book. So in order to use an activity like this in class, carefully preparation would be necessary. About this activity, we should divide the class into pairs, and let them discuss their topics and thoughts. And then let them all “try out” the role-play by free practice. At last, call one or two pairs to act it out.
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During the process of preparing and showing the shows, students can learn to how to make one imperfect text to be perfect. On the process, the free role-play can help to improve the students’ creativity. Maybe the free role-play is very simple to organize but it is also a great influence upon English teaching. For example, it can stimulate the students’ learning motivation and enliven their thinking. We also can find that if students want to finish a show about the free role-play, they must learn to communicate with others and work together. And Communicative Language Teaching is also having the similar purpose to practise our target language.
2.3.3 Teaching theory CLT and free role-plays.
The communicative Approach or simply Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) came into being in the 1970s in the west. “It refers to any approach to language teaching which emphasizes the meaning and use, rather than the form of language which aims at developing the learner’s communicative competence in foreign language teaching and learning” (Hymes, 1974:1). “It emphasizes the process of communication, such as using language appropriately in different types of situations, using language for social interaction with other people” (Howatt, 1984:4). “The strong version of CLT claims that language is acquired through communications”( Howatt，1983:4). “The main characteristics of communicative competence include fluency, accuracy, appropriateness and correct pronunciation” (Gao Ying, 2006:6). It means that learners discover the structural system in the process of learning how to communicate. Most students can get high scores in our paper-tests but low scores in the oral tests. And CLT teaching asked oral ability. So this way can help us improve our junior English class. The free role-play is one of the best identification for CLT teaching way. During the activity of free role-play, students use the language freely and learn to make sentences by them learned to communicate with others, not let students remember the form of language to get high scores. The free role-play emphasizes on learning to communicate in the target language which is same as CLT.
