Speech Circle: A Group Listening and Conversation Activity

Hi everyone! Welcome to Let's Humor, the blog that takes concepts from humor and humorous performance and applies them to the classroom.

For this post, let's examine one improve-based activity in detail. Improvisation, or improv for short, is a kind of acting where the dialogue and the action are created spontaneously by the actor, without any preparation or scripting. It is often funny but does not have to be.

In this kind of acting, it is important to develop listening skills. Here, I will present the listening game Speech Circle, which is suggested by the activity Communal Monologue.

Procedure

Everyone listens and contributes when the follow a simple procedure.

1.      Put your students in a circle.

2.      Ask for a speech topic. This could be any topic the students could participate it. It could also be a monologue from a character’s point of view. This should be a kind of speech, public address, or monologue that students have encountered. Topics can range from the concrete (e.g., dogs) to the abstract (e.g., self-esteem).

3.      In the middle of the circle, one student starts a speech. Allow the speaker enough time to develop some discourse that is meaningful, not just one or two sentences.

4.      Other students jump in and continue the speech. Encourage all students to speak.

5.      The game can end once the monologue is finished. It’s important for the game that everyone listen all the time. Even if students speak in sequence of who is standing in the circle, the others will need to listen.

Students

This is good for a class of five students, and it is ideal for groups of six. Fewer than five students, students can take even turns without standing in circles.

With lower-level students, the teacher can alternate, giving bits of the speech to help students out. In such a situation, you may want to do the game a second time with an easier topic.

Language

This is discourse-level communication, so it may help if students have already learned transitions for time, sequencing, or reasoning, depending on the levels. If the speech is an improvised anecdote, storytelling transitions or phrases may be useful. Any needed language can be taught before or after the activity, but teaching needed language during the activity should be avoided to avoid interfering with fluency or done briefly and with the utmost sensitivity.

If you want to develop monologue skills in your students, skills where they must project a character in an extended speech, guidelines on the structure of a character monologue should be taught over time.

Expansion

After this activity, students can do many things.

• Each can summarize the speech to consolidate what they heard.
• They could change the form of the speech into another form, such as changing a monologue into a dialogue. They can perform the dialogue.
• Students can work in pairs on a related speech, monologue, or dialogue in response to the one done whole class. If the speech was about dogs, students could do a rebuttal to that speech’s opinions, a continuation of the same topic, or a parallel speech, such as on a pet other than dogs, but following similar structure or points. Allow for spontaneity on this stage, too, and give feedback after the speeches have been shared.

That is the activity of Speech Circle. If you use this activity or have any comments or suggestions, please join in and converse about it below.

Happy New Year!

Roger