Alphabet Publishing The Drama Book: Lesson Plans, Activities, and Scripts for English-Language Learners

I bought this book to use as a supplement in my speaking skills class. I wanted to try doing some role-plays and other activities that would foster more spontaneous practice. The Drama book is helping me with that, and so far, I’ve enjoyed doing the lessons. For example, I started with a pronunciation game where students work on saying common utterances like, “That’s ridiculous,” or “What happened?” with stress emphasis and different attitudes. That was a fun ice breaker. Then we did role plays where students had to act out a situation in which they had different goals. They actually used some of the expressions from the previous exercise, which felt good. The role-plays also led to an interesting discussion of how people sometimes say what they mean but sometimes they don’t. I haven’t tried any of the sketches and scripts yet, but they seem to include models of natural dialog, and I appreciate that they are often paired with very specific language learning activities. All in all, there’s a lot of interesting and original material here, and I expect to be exploring the different options for a long time!