Creating Learning Partners: A facilitator’s guide for training effective adult literacy tutors

Activity B

Short dialogue

Tutors create short dialogues, look at the complexity of the task and discuss how to use the dialogue once written.

Activity in pairs
Materials and equipment Flip chart and markers Preparation You might want to prepare the following drawing ahead of time. STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS Draw the following on the flip chart, or you may want to develop your own chain dialogue instead. Ask pairs of tutors to develop a dialogue based on the items you have written down. They will decide the scene (e.g., telephone call, walking by on the sidewalk). They need to put phrases or sentences down for each conversation point. For example, the first speaker could say “Hi. How are you?” for the greeting conversation point. The tutors do not have to use a box format, but they should indicate first and second speaker beside the sentences. You could also do this as a group. Have tutor pairs share their dialogues. Cover the following points: The variations in their dialogues are an example of the complexity of conversation. Suggest that simple dialogues like the one that they just wrote can be used to give learners a format to follow until they are ready for real conversation. These dialogues can be varied by, for example, substituting places, people, and other items in the conversation. Suggest a variation based on a tutor pair dialogue that you have just heard. The learner should move from the easier to the harder speaker’s parts. The dialogues don’t have to be memorized, but certain phrases and sentences will probably be important enough to memorize. Ask a few tutor pairs for an example of a phrase or sentence from their dialogue that would be important to memorize.

Activity in pairs

Materials and equipment

Flip chart and markers

Preparation

You might want to prepare the following drawing ahead of time.

STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

Draw the following on the flip chart, or you may want to develop your own chain dialogue instead.

Ask pairs of tutors to develop a dialogue based on the items you have written down. They will decide the scene (e.g., telephone call, walking by on the sidewalk). They need to put phrases or sentences down for each conversation point. For example, the first speaker could say “Hi. How are you?” for the greeting conversation point. The tutors do not have to use a box format, but they should indicate first and second speaker beside the sentences. You could also do this as a group.
Have tutor pairs share their dialogues.
Cover the following points:
- The variations in their dialogues are an example of the complexity of conversation.
- Suggest that simple dialogues like the one that they just wrote can be used to give learners a format to follow until they are ready for real conversation.
- These dialogues can be varied by, for example, substituting places, people, and other items in the conversation. Suggest a variation based on a tutor pair dialogue that you have just heard.
- The learner should move from the easier to the harder speaker’s parts.
- The dialogues don’t have to be memorized, but certain phrases and sentences will probably be important enough to memorize. Ask a few tutor pairs for an example of a phrase or sentence from their dialogue that would be important to memorize.

Variation

To add some humour, you can create a list of places, a list of situations, and a list of characters, and put them on small folded pieces of paper in three bowls. Each pair pulls one slip from each of the three bowls and creates a short written conversation. (This variation on the activity can also be used with the handouts on role-playing in Section 5, Activity E.)