There’s nothing more confronting than someone speaking to you in a foreign language, especially if you have no idea what to say back to them. Imagine then how it would feel in a room full of people laughing with relief because they are not the one that is being asked the question.
In our show there is no such escape.
Every single student is greeted as they enter the room with a “Hello how are you ? ”
We then go through the Audience asking them to write down on a piece of paper a line from a movie or song or game that the like , or even just write any sentence in English that they like. eg. what they want to do in the afternoon or what they had for breakfast, anything.
Even before the show has started they are already interacting with native English speakers responding to questions, writing sentences in English…
We later use these Sentences in an improvised game where we walk through the audience, give the selected student 3 sentences. We then tell the audience that we are going to improvise these 3 lines in a scene. We ask the Audience to shout out a type of relationship we have (eg Brother and Sister) , We then ask for a location (eg Mars) and finally we ask for a task we need to do or problem we need to solve (call Mom).
The selected students only job at this point is to read a sentence when prompted by the actor, the actor incorporates the sentence into the scene, we do this until the 3 sentences have been read and the story comes to a natural end.. hopefully 🙂
One of the English Teachers from Tielt describes it best .
“What a fun way to bring my students in contact with native speakers! There’s no better way than with humour to make young people enjoy learning a foreign language. Not only did they have to practice their listening skills, but the fact that they could participate in the show is a huge advantage!”
Annelies Docent Engels VTI Tielt