Building your portable oral fluency kit

Language trainers need to be adaptable. There is seldom a week goes by without your being called upon to stand in for your colleague who has had to take her rotweiler to the vet, or when you can't do the wonderful video session you planned because the VCR is on the blink, or, out of the blue, someone offers you a freelance slot at a moment's notice. So what we all need is a box of tricks that requires no technology, no copies, no books: just you and a group. That's precisely what I carry about in my little black bag. I have around twenty activities that I can use anywhere, with any group, at any time.

For your kit you need the following basic equipment: strong A5 manilla envelopes; index cards; sticky labels; a box of cuisenaire rods; a flip chart and plenty of felt-tip pens and board markers; a box containing dice and playing cards; an envelope full of old picture postcards. With this basic kit you can practise any structural you point you wish, do vocabulary enrichment work or simply provide stimuli for oral fluency. I will give you some examples below:

-To practise using structures for talking about the future, take 52 index cards and divide them into four suits to correspond to you pack of playing cards. A simple way to do this is to colour code the cards - use red ink for hearts, blue ink for diamonds, black ink for spades and green ink for clubs. You can find questions to copy on each card by going to http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/362... On the other side mark the specific playing card each one represents. Put your cards into a manilla envelope clipped together in suits. Allow each member of the group to choose a playing card at random. When everyone has a playing card in front of them; go around the group giving each person the corresponding question card. Now ask each person to answer the question on their card. You can repeat this style of exercise with idioms or general fluency topics - you will find more questions on the same web page.

-To practise talking about the past, give each one of the group three sticky labels (two if your group is big; in fact you need the number of labels to match the time options you have below). Tell them these are to have a number in each corner, beginning one - three for the first person of the group and so on until the last person. Make note of how many sticky labels there are because you are going to call a number at random and the person who has that number must write on heir label what you call out. You will call out in random order: the days of the week; the months of the year; the seasons; the main public holidays - Christmas, Easter etc. This should give you something like 21 - 24 time frames. If you need more because of the size of your group add things such as: your last birthday; your last trip to .... You need a time frame for each sticky label. When the labels are finished collect them up and mix them up in an envelope. Now spread a sheet of flip-chart paper on a desk or the floor and ask the group to take the labels out at random and stick them to the paper. You now have the basis for the exercise. By throwing the dice, each group member will talk about the time their score corresponds to. Throw the dice twice or three times to get the higher numbers. Each person must talk about what they did last Monday; last January etc. Elaborate the game by making the others in the group ask questions.

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