Come up with a dialogue for a skit between students. Choose a topic or theme, such as family vacation, first day of school year, camping or sleepover. You can also come up with a conflict for each story, such as, in the family vacation topic, missing the flight for the destination. If your students are at a more advanced English language level, allow them to come up with a dialogue together. Ask the students to get into character to play their parts. For example, in the family example, each student may play a role like the mother, father, brother and sister. They will communicate with each other about what to do since they missed their flight. Encourage creativity, humor and dramatic effect.
Play games that feature English words and popular phrases. For example, board games that feature plays on words, catch phrases and popular quotes from English-language TV shows and movies is a fun way for students to learn English phrases. However, other quieter board games, like Scrabble, help the students build English vocabulary to help with communication. If you are tutoring a student, or students, feel free to help students find words in the letter tiles.
Organize students into small groups for a creative writing exercise. Give each group a topic, such as phone conversation, writing home, preparing for a soccer game or snow day. One person in each group will write one sentence with less than 15 words on a lined sheet of paper. When she finishes writing her sentence on the topic, she folds the paper over so the next person cannot see her sentence. After a few circulations, stop the exercise and let everyone read the sentences all together. It's likely the "story" won't make sense. Encourage students to put the sentences in an order that does make sense for effective communication in English. For instance, a student may write, in the phone conversation topic, "Hi, Sarah! I just got home from school. How are you?" and another student may write, "I'm calling to let you know...I passed the test!" Then students can re-order the sentences in a way they feel is best.
Ask students to make up believable dialogues for characters in the movie clips you show. For instance, if you show the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when Dorothy first lands in Oz, you can create a made-up dialogue for Dorothy and the good queen. If you show a clip from "The Beauty and the Beast," students can create a conversation between Belle and the Beast. Students may write the dialogue on a separate sheet of paper. Be sure to keep the movie on mute. If you want to show the actual dialogue between characters, you can show the clips in full sound after the exercise.