Recently I’ve been reading Learning Vocabulary in Another Language by I.S.P. Nation (cambridge australia link) again - was reading this ages ago and didn’t finish. A few days ago there was some material in this book that I wanted to blog, but I didn’t make note of it and cannot find it now.

However today I found an interesting teaching activity that I think would go over very well in class. I’m going to copy directly from the bottom of page 136 to the top of 138.

Role play
Role play activites can involve a written text on which the role play is based and many involve written instruction to the role players. The “Say it!” activity combines these features and is a simple introduction to roleplay. In Say it! learners read a short text such as a newspaper report containing the wanted vocabulary. They can read it and disucss it together i fthey wish. Then they look at a grid containing tshort tasks for them to permorm. The columns in the grid are labelled with the lettters A, B, C and the rows are numbered. The first learner in the group says the reference of a square, for example, B2, and the second learner in the has to perform the task contained in that square. After that the second learner says a square reference and the third learner has to perform that task. This continues around the group. The same task may be performed more than once by different learners in the group.Here is the newspaper report on which the following Say it! is based. The learners need to read the report carefully and discuss it before doing the activity.

Castaways Survived on Shark’s Blood
Three fishermen who drifted on the Pacific for four months told yesterday how they drank shark’s blood to survive.
The fishermen from Kiribati told their story through an interpreter in the American Samoa capital of Pago Pago after being rescured by the ship Sakaria.

Kautea Teaitoa, Veaieta Toanuea, and Tebwai Aretana drifted 400 kilometres from home after their outboard motor failed on February 8.

They said four ships had refused to help them during thier ordeal.

When they were picked up on June 4 they had eaten the last of a one-metre shark four days before and drunk all of its blod.

‘I have not prayed so much in all my life,’ Mr Aretana said.

                               

A	B	C	D
1	You are Kautea. Say what helped you survive	You are Tebwai Aretana. How did you feel when the ships refused to help you?	You are a sailor on the Sakaria. What did you do to help the fishermen?
2	You are Tebwai. Explain why you were in the boat and what happened after it broke down.	You are Kautea. How did you feel when you caught the shark?	You are the captain. Explain why you stopped.
3	You are Veaieta. Explain what caused the problem.	You are the interpreter. Describe the feelings and appearance of the three men.	The journey was called an ordeal. Why was it an ordeal?

Notice that the tasks in each square are designed to encourage use of the wanted vocabulary and that they require the learners to reshape what was in the text to suit the viewpoint of the task. If the text is read, discussed, understood and then put away beforedoing the activity, then retrieval is encouraged. The role play nature of the tasks encourages generative use of the vocabulary.

Larger problem solving rold play activities can involve substatial written input that needs to be processed in a similar way (Nation, 1991b). Learners need to read about the background to the problem, the problem, the constraints on the solution, and their own roles.

There is much that comes before this section that is also very interesting, however as soon as I read this I wanted to try the activity out in my class. It not only sounds engaging but I can definitely see how it is promoting vocabulary acquisition. I highly recommend reading this book if you have the time.