How To Keep Your Audience Involved During Student Skits

An FLTEACH listserv user recently asked what teachers do to keep students in the audience involved. Here are some of the responses:

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If students write out the skits before hand, collect a copy and then scan through through the scripts to pick out main details from each skit for students to listen for. You can even call on students to perform their skits in the order of the questions on the sheet. Questions can be basic target language questions - What did Kevin try to order in the restaurant? What was the problem with Angela's soup? etc.

You can also have students listen to make nominees for an awards ceremony - Have prize categories for best actor -dramatic, best actor - comedy, best actress - drama, best actress - comedy, best accent, etc. etc. You can have them turn in their nominations with a one sentence explanation or justification.

Heller, B. Re: [FLTEACH] Skits. FLTEACH listserv (FLTEACH@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU, 5 Apr 2013).

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For lower level students, I'd have the students submit their lines in advance and create three different tally sheets so that there were different listening tasks. Otherwise the students would just watch the audience and copy what the smarter audience members wrote. The years I purchase those 10 for $1.oo folders I have hand out the sheets in the folder to block others from seeing their answers/knowing which sheet others had, and have them submit them in the folders. Once the observation is over, just pull out the sheets, score and return as usual. I'd score their answers as a listening assessment.

The three tasks would be:
1. Take a few lines from each one and prepare a worksheet with them. Students have to identify who said the line.
2. Determine the key word in each presentation and have the students count the number of times they hear the word. (Obviously each skit would have a different key word.)
3. Have students match the items to the person holding them or speaking about them.

Shrager, E. [FLTEACH] Skits. FLTEACH listserv (FLTEACH@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU, 6 Apr 2013).