Incorporating technology into teaching L2 conversation through scenarios

Teachers often struggle to engage students to speak in class. Research has shown that language learners wrestle with oral fluency even after two full years of second language instruction (Rossiter, Derwing, Manimtin and Thomson 2010: 584). In this paper we explore innovations on teaching the spoken language, based on Robert Di Pietro’s (1987) psycholinguistic and humanistic approach to acquiring a language through Strategic Interaction, thus promoting the desire to communicate. In our study we describe and explain how the Scenario methodology was successfully used and enhanced in language classes at the Australian National University in two different levels and in two different languages. While Di Pietro’s methods concentrated on giving grammatical and cultural explanations based on
students’ improvisations on the proposed scenarios, we were able to expand on this aspect by asking students to write a script based on their improvisations and to present it again to the class. This was facilitated by advances in technology whereby students accessed a digital recording of their improvisation through the university learning management system. Through this process, students incorporated cultural and linguistic insights—gained in the debriefing on their improvisation—into their script and second theatre-like representation.