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Ideas about movies, role-play, and language teaching material

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Garfinkeling your Roleplays

This article attempts to apply the ideas of anthropological linguistics to English teaching. Most of the ideas are motivated by the book "Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation" by Michael Agar, professor at the University of Maryland, a book rich in metaphor and ideas applicable to language teaching. Of particular note, is the light the book sheds on the notion of communicative competence, an idea central to teaching English with the communicative method.

Situations in role plays or communicative activities usually have a problem, a conflict, or plot complication built into them. For example,"you were supposed to meet your friend at a specific street corner. After waiting for half an hour, ask someone on the street if you are at the right corner. He tells you that there is another corner that meets your description and that perhaps you should go there. Ask the person to direct you and when you get there apologize to your friend for being late." (Zelman,1986,21)

The problem is often only a problem in so far as language must be found to deal with a novel, unexpected situation. It is a communication problem. For example, you might be happy to meet an old friend, but you must solve the problem of what to say and how to talk to the old friend after so many years of not seeing each other. Meeting the old friend is not the problem, what to say is.

A sociologist named Garfinkel used the term "ethnomethods" to refer to the ways that people get things done in everyday life, the kind of standard close-ended scripts that form the conversational norm. Open-ended scripts result when there is a conflict or break-down in standard scripts or when there is a problem that can't be solved by them.

A way to find out when these problems or conflicts might occur is simply to ignore the standard script, "make a mistake on purpose." This mistake will generate a problem or conflict. You'll get a reaction from the people around you a sort of "say what?" reaction. This technique is now called "Garfinkeling." (Agar, 1994, 168-170) For example, Someone makes a collect phone call.

Caller: I'd like to place a collect call.
Operator: Can I have the number, sir.
Caller: Area code 999, 123-4567.
Operator: May I have your name, sir?
Caller: John Smith.
Operator: Oh, are you Mary's brother?
Caller: Huh? Mary? Yes I am.
Operator: God, We went to school together.
Caller: Far out. How is she? I haven't seen her in years.
(Conversation continues...)
The standard script for making a collect phone call has been disrupted by the operator when she finds out that she shares something in common with the caller. This leads to a whole different set of scripts coming into play, the scripts that old friends use when they meet for the first time in many years. A specification of this role play situation might read as follows: "You call up the operator to place a collect phone call. When you give her your name and the number you want to dial she thinks she recognizes your voice as that of the brother of an old friend. It turns out she is right and you exchange a few words about your sister, where she lives now, what she is doing nowadays, etc.")

Situations with problems built into them have several advantages. First, there is no standard close-ended script that the students can follow in the role-play, so they are forced to think and employ different functional categories of language to work out the problem. They have to match situations to appropriate language, and not simply repeat language they have learned as they would in a drill.

Second, the presence of a problem in a role play situation makes it more interesting, memorable, and engaging for the student which should help the student with retention of the material. It makes the activity read more like a piece of creative writing, like a novel or a drama. Often it is the element of surprise or unexpectedness, the jarring quality of a situation or language use that engages the student. Michael Lewis in The Lexical Approach writes:

Ask yourself when was the last time you found a sample of English in a basic coursebook which surprised you --- it seemed a novel or unusual language item? If you have never been surprised by the language in the coursebooks you use, it is obvious that this language has been pre-digested in order to conform to language teachers' expectations. (185)
Third, problematic situations account for many of the situations that the student will encounter in everyday life (in what is most likely a foreign culture for him if he's learning English in the first place), so if the teacher is trying to incorporate "authentic use" into his classroom and give his students a slice of real life, then he must incorporate situations with open-ended problems that can be worked out in several different ways. The close-ended problem-free everyday life ritual scripts referred to above simply aren't enough.

Fourth, situations that require the use of language from multiple categories of functional language may ultimately lead to better retention of the new lexical items by the student because the language is coming from different semantic fields:
...learning items together that are near synonyms, opposites, or free associates is much more difficult than learning unrelated items.; that is learning hot and cold at the same time makes learning more difficult, because many of the learners will mix the word forms and the meanings and will be unsure after the lesson whether hot means 'hot' or hot means 'cold'. Similarly, learning items like shrewd, sly, cunning, or crafty, sympathy, compassion, pity, together results in more confusion than clarity and increases the difficulty of learning. The time for such activities is when all or all except one of the items in a group are largely familiar to the learners and they now need to clarify the distinctions between them...(Nation and Newton, 251; Higa, 1963)
How do you Garfinkel your roleplays? For starters, note down the situations you encounter in your own life. If you have a boring life, watch a movie. The scenes of some movies are full of viable roleplay situations. I've gone through the first eleven scenes of the film "Sabrina", transcribed the dialogues, determined which language functions hold force, and come up with some roleplay situations.

If you need some more help try the book Conversational Inspirations for ESL (Zelman,1986) which has lists of roleplay situations most of which are fairly simple and therefore of limited interest. I've found that the situations in this book only become interesting and usable when they are made a little bit more complicated and problematic. To complicate a situation, choose a second situation that jars or surprises the reader a little bit when juxtaposed with the first. Of the two role play situations mentioned above, "Asking for directions and apologizing for being late" and "Making a collect phone call and meeting an old friend of a friend," the later is more surprising or unexpected. There's also a great article on roleplay with a good bibliography in the August, 1998 issue of the Internet Tesol Journal (ITESLJ) at: http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Techniques/Tompkins-RolePlaying.html.

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Movies as self-access material

Apart from generating role-play situations, the film could also be viewed in its entirety by students as a self-access activity. A recent journal article points towards role-play as a method of schema activation, as a way to "encourage observation of the situation and other contextual cues that may assist comprehension" and "activate...knowledge of situations that will be coming." This article suggests getting "the students to construct the possible interaction" in a scene before watching the scene (pp. 4-5 of 5). (Internet TESL Journal, Vol. IV, No. 11, November 1998, http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Articles/Tatsuki-HotSpots.html )

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Teachers' cooperatives, materials databases, and computer-aided lesson planning

There is potential for automating the whole process of creating teaching material from movie scenes. If a group of teachers got together in a teachers' cooperative to exchange movie scenes they find useful via the internet, a database of scenes could be established, a database that could eventually cover a large percentage of the language functions found on syllabuses. XML/XSL (XML is a markup language. XSL is a document style, extraction, and transformation language) which are going to form the centerpiece of the next generation of browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 5) could be then used to create a search and extraction engine to find scenes that match language functions that are being taught or role-play situations that the teacher might find useful.

In the end the goal in using scenes from movies as the basis for role-play is to provide students with interesting and engaging material, interesting and engaging the way good creative writing is.

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Bibliography

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