Disappearing dialogues

Here's a way of working with short dialogues in class. Reconstructing a text in the following manner gives your students the chance to deal with with aspects of language such as discourse features, grammar, vocabulary and intonation. It's a simple exercise that you can use again and again with lots of different material, but it gets students concentrating and gives them a sense of achievement. I think I first came across it at a workshop given by Mario Rinvolucri.

Who it's for:
All levels

What it's for:
Understanding discourse patterns, working on short-term memory, collocations and phrases

What you need:
A short dialogue from Spotlight such as you'll find in the language section (e.g. Vocabulary, Grammar Page, Travel Talk, Everyday English)

What you do:
Write the short dialogue on the board. Get students to act it out a couple of times so that it becomes familiar.

Erase some key content words from the dialogue. Ask students to act it out again, adding the missing words from memory.

Continue erasing words until only a skeleton framework is left of the original dialogue. As students act it out a third and fourth time (with a variety of partners), they rely much more on their memory to produce chunks of language. Go through the gapped dialogue a couple of times as a whole class. Knowing that they are providing the language themselves can give students a great feeling of achievement.

Finish the activity by getting the group to reconstruct the dialogue again in writing from memory. Do this collaboratively (with the teacher as scribe) or individually.