And the most valuable member of society is...

In a language-learning perspective, there is nothing more valuable than an activity which elicits free-flowing, active communication. This communication activity I prepared several weeks ago for my Intermediate adults class was extremely successful, and it was also fun.

The topic was living without a salary, and we talked about a society where people lived by bartering goods or services. In this activity, students had to pretend that they were living in a bartering society, and they had to think about their most valuable assets in terms of skills or personal attributes, as well as their biggest weaknesses. Then, in speed-dating fashion, students had to interview one another in an inner-circle/outer-circle seating format where only students in the outer circle had to rotate seats with every new interview round. During the interviews, students asked each other about what they could offer as a member of a bartering society, and what weaknesses they had. Each interview round lasted about 2 or 3 minutes, with each student interviewing half of the class.

At the end, students had to vote on the three people that they felt would be the most valuable member in our hypothetical society. During the break, I tallied all the votes and our top three members were chosen. In our very own Award Ceremony, I presented the top 3 winners, starting with the runner-ups, and had them go up the "aisle" and "stairs" up to the "stage" (drawn on the floor), where they were given their "trophy" and where they would give an acceptance speech to the whole class, including why they believed they were chosen as a valuable member.

This activity was loads of fun, involving a lot of natural communication between students, and the award show in the end was exciting!

 

Here is a video snippet of the first runner-up winner, Huy, giving his acceptance speech. Unfortunately my iPhone ran out of memory at that point, so I wasn't able to catch his whole speech, which was excellent!