A couple of good stories

Procedure:

1) Show students a picture of two people. (Not too outlandish ones.) Projection via OHP works fine. Tell students that you know the people in the picture very well and are willing to answer questions about them.

2) As students keep asking questions make up your answers but be consistent. Occasionally throw in an unusual bit of information, e.g. Why they moved back to London? Well, they wanted to be closer to their son, who was in prison at the time. After about 5-10 minutes declare that you do not really know the people but just made up the whole story.

3) Now pair students and ask them to decide which one in their pair is A and which one is B. A gets a picture and has to pretend to know the people in it. B has to ask questions and keep asking. The more insistenly the better.

4) When the picture seems to have been exhausted, hand out the second picture, this time to student B. Repeat the process. Sometimes students will want to go on and talk about a third picture. It would be good to have a few at hand so that you can keep everybody talking.

WHY

Students can use their imagination to tell wild and wonderful stories. And question practice is an added bonus.

Pictures of couples - not necessarily married ones. Any two people in a possibly intriguing setting are fine. You will need one picture per student and a few back-up copies for early finishers. You will also need one picture for yourself.

To have a useful picture library copy interesting pictures from newspapers. You can enlarge them an a photocopier for them to have roughly the same size on A4 sheets. An identical shape makes for better storage of the pictures.

ON THE WEB

Some useful pictures may be found using the Google picture search for couples or pairs. But most of these would be very small. Newspaper pictures are more useful.