About this workshop
Introduction
This workshop focuses on open-ended role plays that center around interactionally / pragmatically sensitive situations, with two goals in mind:
1) To provide examples to show how being polite or impolite is done (including phenomena such as minimization, hedging, and delays)
2) To provide an example of how role plays can be designed and utilized in the language classroom. Please refer to the supplemental material for transcriptions of the role plays and analytic annotations.
Time commitment
30 minutes
Who Should Attend?
New faculty, language instructors…
Before you start
1. Consider your experiences in making invitations and requests. Do they always go smoothly or as you planned them? What kinds of difficulties have you faced when making or responding to invitations and requests, and where do these difficulties come from?
2. Have you used role plays in your own language classes? Do you give students time to prepare or are the spontaneous? Do the students play a pre-assigned role or do they “play themselves” within the situation? Do the role plays come across as authentic? Is it okay if the role plays are inauthentic, and that the students may make them entertaining? What are the pros and cons of each of these factors?
Workshop videos
The faculty role plays
In this segment, the faculty act out role plays designed to elicit actions such as invitations and requests, and a variety of responses to these. These role plays highlight the potential difficulties interactants face in producing and responding to such actions, and the often times extensive interactional work required to accomplish them.
