One Act Plays - Students' Notes

These one act play dialogues are designed to depict practical, real life situations using common everyday, idiomatic English conversation.

Each dialogue represents a story in itself, it is a story told by different people who are directly involved in the events that occur.

The aim is to provide a series of interesting, informative and challenging dialogues to help students improve their comprehension of the way the English language is normally used.

While this is primarily for group work in a classroom, individual students can gain a good insight from studying the conversational English used in the dialogues.

Each dialogue involves a number of different characters and, as a role play, each student, acting the part of one of the characters, should try to see themselves actually in that role.

This means they need to closely follow the conversation, understand what is being discussed, and participate when it is their turn to be actively involved.

A play needs to be rehearsed, and practiced, before it can be perfected. The same applies to these dialogues; the groups need to read them first and make sure they understand the meaning of the words and idiomatic speech used.

Spoken English will often differ from the formal grammar requirements of written English and this is one of the features of these dialogues.

Each dialogue includes a series of questions that are designed to help the students’ comprehension of the topic being discussed. There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers to most of the questions because they are directed to the opinions of the group. The questions deliberately try to involve group discussion as an additional incentive for the students to practice their Oral English in the classroom.

The actual conversational time of each dialogue is designed to cover between 15 and 20 minutes.