Situations might involve ordering a meal, asking a hotel clerk to contact a doctor because of a stomachache, arranging to buy tickets with a travel agent or asking for directions to the bus station. For a role-play, two students are called up to the front of the class. They are asked to read the brief description of the role-play. Buy a ticket from the travel agent . The students are each assigned a role, and they begin.
Unfamiliar situations are much more complicated for students to act out.
They are most appropriate to use in a class when students are doing fairly well with the survival situations. The unfamiliar situations still involve two actors, and the descriptions still are brief. You then realize that someone must have stolen your wallet earlier in the day. Explain the situation to the receptionist. Survival and unfamiliar situations offer students a chance, right at the beginning of a program, to speak creatively in front of their class, under circumstances where they have not prepared what they are going to say beforehand.