Performance: Conversation Scenes from Everyday Life

Performance is a new book with a new approach that really does get students thinking and talking. Each unit contains an opportunity to observe, hypothesize, and experiment with language. Borrowing from drama theory and with a dash of role play methodology, Performance puts students into daily conversational interactions that everyone can identify with.
Drawing from Shakespeare s All the world is a stage and we are merely players, the text asks us to look at our lives as players and see the many roles we play as customers, workers, students, and family members. Each unit puts us in a different situation where we think about the setting, the characters and our motivation, as well as the language we might use. To do this, we first observe a scene, where we must imagine the dialog. Next, we hypothesize by putting ourselves in the scene and imagining what language would be appropriate to the scene. The listening section gives us variations on similar situations to stretch our creative imagination and our language boundaries. The Learn Your Lines resource pages provide sufficient scaffolding for the students to write and perform their own variations on the unit`s theme.
KEY FEATURES: Each unit focuses on a common daily interaction such as making polite requests, putting things away, asking directions or expressing preferences. Students can identify with the common situations and highly predictable language so that the challenge becomes what they want to say in the target language. The colorfully illustrated Scenes provide context for the situational conversations. Hypothesizing about the dialogue for the scenes helps students discover their own language strengths and weaknesses. The Sound Check section of fun listening exercises provide an expanded repertoire of useful phrases. The Learn Your Lines resource pages go even further in giving the student a bank of practical daily survival level phrases. The Getting Into Character exercises help build fluency with the target structures. The Write Your Own Script and Performance sections help the students create their own conversation scenes from everyday life.