The Ultimate Collection of Role Play Situations!

These ideas were collected from messages on the TESL-L listserv around 1999-2000 by Nigel A. Caplan

1. The parents of a teenager are called to the school to talk about the young person's smoking grass behind the school buildings after school. (3 characters)

2. You are stuck in an elevator between the 48th and 49th floors. There are 5 people in the elevator, including one pregnant woman and a delivery man with a large hand truck and a blind person with a seeing-eye dog. (5 characters - and, no, no one is allowed to play the dog!)

3. You are in an New York City bus and someone is playing a radio very loudly. The driver asks the radio-player to stop and refuses to drive while the radio is on. You are in a big hurry and want the radio turned off. Other passengers think that it is freedom of speech to play a radio. (about 5 characters)

4. A couple is in a restaurant to celebrate Valentine's Day. There is a fly in the woman's soup, but the waiter is not helpful. (3 characters)

Anthea Tillyer City University of New York (USA) ABTHC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

1. You are strolling in a department store. Walking around, you see a person who seems familiar, but you're not sure. On a whim, you decide to stop the person and find out of s/he knows you. It turns out, after some questioning, that the two of you went to the same high school, but at the time the other person weighed 25 kilos more. That's why you couldn't recognize him/her.

2. Two friends are waiting in line to get into a movie, talking about casual things. Suddenly you remember that you left some soup cooking on the stove at home.
Lida Baker UCLA Extension, American Language Center Los Angeles, California.

A couple are having a romantic night out at a fancy night club, dancing and discussing their plans to wed in the near future. The night is going wonderfully when the woman decides to go to powder her nose. As she is returning from the ladies room, she spots another woman at their table holding her fiancees hand and looking into his eyes. She approaches the table and.... Here is where the students must take up the story. I tell them that they can make a happy, tragic, comic etc. ending.
Jerry Kammer Madrid, Spain kammer@retemail.es

In my class, students favor picking up some extraordinary (you never know) situations normally prepared and then acted by two or three students and then presented to the class. Anyone may join the acting. Such situations always evoke a great deal of response from the whole of the group, for we all are side-gazers. Examples:
a) after a few desperate attempts aimed at puling out his patient's bad tooth, the dentist asks their colleagues for help who then offer any weird advice (sometimes you may get too much of sick humor but it pays off);
b) a police officer is trying to persuade a naked person by the fountain to stop trying to catch fish and leave the place (others are passers-by eager to help both);
c) in a restaurant, a piece of chicken has run out of the client's dish and is hiding someplace; everyone (the chef, the waiter, the people around) is offering their help.
Nikolai Semyonov
POLYGLOT language School Rostov-on-Don, Russia nas828@aaanet.ru

1. Interruptions. A couple are trying to watch a film on TV, but are interrupted by a series of unwanted visitors: a talkative friend, the gas man, a neighbour who's lost his/her keys, a stranger who's mysteriously convinced that this is his house ...

2. Hotel reception: a rich foreign guest and his/her secretary are arguing with the receptionist about the bill. Various random guests approach the desk and join in the argument, for instance: a bridegroom, a family with lots of small kids, a film star "incognito", paparazzi photographers etc.

3. On the bus: I like this one a lot - each student gets on the "bus" as a different character (eg pregnant woman, old man with dog, two teenagers going shopping etc) until *crash* - and they have to react appropriately. Certainly in England, it's not the done thing to talk to complete strangers on the bus, except in an emergency such as this. You could do a similar scene in a supermarket check-out queue, too.

4. Titanic: more catastrophes, I'm afraid, but I had a really positive experience with a class last year doing some activities based on the story of the Titanic (the real thing, and NOT the film!). At one point, I got them to act sketches based on true (?) stories from the Titanic, changing them to make them dramatic if necessary, or adding endings where none is known. There are some wonderful mysteries about exactly what happened in the lifeboats, and what the men did after seeing their wives off, and of course there's the band - Walter Lord's wonderful account, 'A Night to Remember' is a good source, as are these web sites: www.titanic-online.com , www.titanic.eb.com For human interest, you can't go wrong with the Titanic. NAC.

Any role-play situation can be performed in many different ways. There are many different genres that can be exploited: Drama, comedy, tragedy, horror, satire are just the obvious few. By assigning a genre as well as a situation, each situation can be performed in many different ways. Imagine Anthea's elevator performed as horror, then tragedy, then comedy.

I have done this with improv sessions, where the class has built up a bank of situations and we do it all by chance. First, draw a group of students, then a situation, and finally, roll the dice for a genre. The students have 30 seconds to organize and then they are *on*. I have found that the improvs work best when the class has generated their own situations. The sense of ownership helps overcome the shyness. My favorite was 3 students doing "The Skating Lesson.".... not as comedy, but as horror.

John Jessop Quebec, Canada jl_jess@alcor.concordia.ca

<timeforkids.com> from TIME MAGAZINE is a marvelous site that offers short up-to-date situations which not only offer reading and vocabulary practice but also interesting topics for role plays. This week, for example, one of the topics is "Top 5 Valentine Day Chocolates," which would make a great role-play for a man, a woman, and a salesclerk. Guess who prefers chocolate covered cherries, men or women?

Kent Sutherland <ksuther929@aol.com> Canada /ka 'nya da/ College, Redwood City, California USA

On the current subject of role play suggestions I'd like to recommend the News of the Weird site. It features a paragraph summary of almost unbelievable news stories. The role play can be done by reading the news story and assigning students to act out the roles of some of the characters in the news story. www.NewsoftheWeird.com

David Kees
ALTEC Training Centers, Guangzhou, China davkees@public.guangzhou.gd.cn

In speaking class, I used to integrate the communicative skill with their possible future careers.

First, to be successful salesmen(women), learners need skills to communicate their products to the potential buyers. Usually I assigned one or two students to be the salesman with a particular product they have chosen either the real products such as cosmetics, books, and foods or services such as travels and education.
The rest of the students in that group will become potential buyers who ask different questions to get the detail features or information of the products(services) offered. In presentation, the seller(s)can bring his or her own real product or perhaps brochures for the students who want to introduce the services to make his/her presentation more alive.

The other role play, one or two learners can act as tour guides who explain the historical spots, the cultural uniques, the weather and climates, typical foods, and many others that the learners can cover within the given time. The rest of the students will become the tourists who are allowed to ask relevant questions to the tour guides. The presenters are requested to bring some photos of the tourism places.
Dwi Poedjiastutie (Master Student) Deakin University Victoria, Australia <pastutie3@HOTMAIL.COM>

Can I quickly add two variants to Dwi Poedjiastutie's excellent suggestions?

1. The salesperson: Assign ridiculous objects or concepts for them to sell, and see how inventive them can be (eg the contents of their school bag, a potato, the class room, the blackboard, the teacher (?), the end of the rainbow, the British Prime Minister (or equivalent), Big Ben ...). It's a great public speaking exercise if nothing else!

2. The tour guide can be made a lot funnier if some students "play" the sites that s/he is describing. There's no reason why you can't have talking monuments! A slightly different activity, which I always finds hysterical, is the zoo - yes, the students play the animals (talking ones, this time!), and you can wander round asking them about themselves and what they think about the zoo. Maley & Duff have more on animals, I think. I tried that with some younger kids over the summer, and it worked really well - you need to get them to think of the characteristics of their animal (regal lions, proud peacocks, scared ostriches etc). NAC

One element which seems to have been left out in this discussion is the importance of contextualized activities. Here's an example of what I've been doing this week with the beginning/intermediate students in my intensive class. This week we are working on consumer complaints and to practice vocabulary, expressions etc. I paired up students and gave each one a card with a scenario. For instance. "You are at a bookstore. You bought a book a month ago and want to return it because you didn't like it..." Or, "You are at a restaurant. The food you ordered is cold and not very well cooked..." Students were instructed to act out the scene and convince their partner (the bookstore clerk, the waiter) to give them a refund, a free meal and so forth. This provided students with an opportunity to create a complaint and convince their partner that they were right, using the vocabulary, expressions and strategies we have discussed in class. I had, on purpose, made some of the scenarios a little bit silly (such as returning a book simply because you didn't like it) and this forced the students to think and talk even more as the bookstore clerk had to explain that he would not take the book back simply because the customer didn't like it. However, I tried to use authentic situations as much as possible so that students would get to practice the kind of language they would use if an actual situation came up.

I also put students in groups of 4 and gave them campus problems (such as parking, safety, cafeteria food) to construct complaints about. Here they had to work as a group and decide to whom they should complain, what their compliant should contain, how they should complain (letter to the President of the university, or the campus newspaper, etc.), what they would like done and so on. Each group then presented their information to the other group.

Jeannette Horwitz - Wright State University - USA - jeannette.horwitz@wright.edu