Page 83 - @ccess 2 Teacher´s Book

Practice 5

I SPEAK ALONE;
I SPEAK FOR YOU

Activity 1
• When they have completed this
practice, your students will be
ready to say a monologue. At
B1 level, your students should
be able to hold their own
and be ready to deliver long
stretches of oral production with
a minimum of hesitation and
without veering off topic. This
is good evidence of
being an independent user of
the language.
• You may want to start the
questions by asking your
students if they have been
to the theater. Maybe they
participated in a school play as
part of the classwork in their
mother tongue. As they will see
throughout this practice, while
monologues are not exclusive of
theater, they are used frequently
in plays as a way of linking
different parts of a play or to convey the inner thoughts and emotions of a character. Because there is no
narrator in theater, there are only two ways of understanding the thoughts of a character: by means of their
actions, or by having them express their thoughts and emotions via a monologue directly to the audience.
• A note of interest: the monologue is the oldest form of theater expression. In the first plays in Greek drama
(about 2500 years ago), a single character used to appear on stage. This preceded the appearance of two
or more actors conversing between themselves, so monologue gave way to dialogue, not the other way
around, as we may think.
- Go to Track 60 and use the visual resources to support your teaching strategies.
• Some answers for the questions might be:
- In the pictures, the person is singing or acting.
- Because it’s a monologue (he is addressing the public directly).
- In both, about a story.
- Because he has stage fright.
- Because he is talking in a big venue.
- I’d like to be the character on image 3, because he shows trust and self-confidence. I would like to talk
about my childhood.
Students may give longer answers than these. The examples are only indicative.

82 Teacher’s Book / Practice 5