Topic of Our Choice!! Scripted Dialogues

For this free topic blog, I decided to write about the advantages and disadvantages of using scripted L2 material in an L2 classroom. When I was a senior in high school, the Spanish teacher for whom I was a TA told me about the idea of having students repeat pre-memorized, scripted phrases each day in order to become more familiar with the structures and sounds of grammatically correct sentences. For example, if I were to use this idea in a Spanish classroom, the students would come into class and I would say, “Hola clase, ¿cómo están ustedes hoy?” and they would say back to me “Hola señorita Ainaire, estamos muy bien, ¿y cómo está usted hoy?” I would say “Estoy muy bien hoy, gracias por preguntar. Clase, ¿qué quieren hacer en clase hoy?” And they would say “Señorita Ainaire, ¡queremos aprender mucho español hoy!” I would say “¡Eso es fabuloso, porque vamos a aprender mucho español hoy!” and they would say “¡Hoy va a ser un buen día!”

I know this example is pretty simple and a little cheesy, but this is just so you all can get the basic idea. Although the teacher that I was a TA for never actually used this idea in her classroom, she highly recommended it to me and I’ve thought about it many times since then. We saw from the Audiolingual Approach that memorizing dialogues can be helpful sometimes, but it does not promote much creativity. I definitely do not think that this dialogue memorization idea should be the only approach used by the L2 teacher because, as said before, this approach does not allow the students to use much creativity at all. However, I do see some benefits to this idea. By repeating a scripted set of phrases every day, the correct structures for these sentences will become engrained in students’ memories throughout time and practice. Even if the students have not learned about the verb “estar” or about “ir + a + infinitive,” they will have these forms in their memories so when it does come time to formally learn about them, students will already feel (at least a little) familiar with them. With this idea, I think it would be good to have one short set of dialogue (like the example above) for about two or three weeks. After those two or three weeks, I would teach the students a new dialogue (something about the current season, for example) and we would practice that one for two or three weeks as well. These short dialogue exchanges would only take one or two minutes from each class, and they would be done every day.

            I’ve always thought this was a pretty neat idea, and I’d like to hear what you all think about it. Again, I would not use these pre-memorized dialogues for more than one or two minutes of each class—I just thought it seemed like a good way to get students familiar with some verb forms, some vocabulary, and some grammatical structures before formally learning what they mean and how to use them. Although there is no student creativity involved, I think that, for a short little activity, this idea could be very helpful to many students.