Round Table Discussion

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## Description

This activity was modified from  J-KURU Tokyo's language exchange activity in order to provide some scaffolding to students when we began having bimonthly discussion lessons.

This activity is perfect for supplementing textbook topics. In my classes, after students have read a lesson in the textbook, we spend one class period discussing a related topic using this structure. For example, after reading a textbook chapter about world population growth, we had a discussion about "Your Future Family" (i.e. Do you want to get married in the future? What kind of person will your spouse be? Do you want to have children? How many children do you want? Where do you want to live? etc.)

## Procedure

1. Have students make a group of five people; one student will be the Leader, the other four students will be Speakers
	1. Have the Leader write down the Speakers' names on the bottom of their paper (see photo).
2. Introduce the discussion topic/question
	1. Try to keep the topics/questions as open ended as possible so that students can have a variety of opinions and can easily think of further questions to ask (For example, the general topic "Your Future Family" is better than "Do you want to have children in the future?")
3. **[3-5 minutes]** Have the Leader choose one Speaker to be the first Main Speaker.
	1. The Main Speaker will speak for as long as they can about their opinion.
		1. The Leader will check the box where the Main Speaker's name intersects their own to show that they spoke while they were the Main Speaker.
	2. Then, the Leader will use their Useful Phrases section to prompt the Secondary Speakers to ask some follow-up questions to the main speaker.
	3. Secondary Speakers should use their Useful Phrases sections to comment on and ask questions regarding the Main Speaker's opinion/ideas.
		1. The Leader should check the box where the Secondary Speakers' names intersect the Main Speaker's name to show they spoke during the Main Speaker's time.
4. **[3-5 minutes]** Have the Leader choose the next Main Speaker.
	1. Repeat until all Speakers have had a chance to be the Main Speaker.
5. **[ALL THE WHILE]** Students should use the center area of the worksheet to take notes of any words they look up using their dictionaries while talking.
6. If you have time, have the group choose a new Leader and repeat the activity with a new discussion topic/question.

* If you have time at the end of the activity, have students share the words they wrote in their notes section. You can have them discuss in their groups, or have a representative from each group come to the board to write a few new words and go over them as a class. You will likely find that the students discover creative new words - "polygamy" is one of my favorite student discoveries so far.

## Variations

* **For an easier time:** Keep track of time for your students and shorten the allotted time to match your students' ability. For example, beginners to discussion questions may feel more comfortable with a thirty second speaking time after which each student should ask one basic question.
* **For an easier time:** Provide a list of follow-up questions and/or useful vocabulary for your topic.
* **For a challenge:** Have advanced students focus on specific sentence structures used in discussions. For example, my third year Conversation class used this sheet, which I made using the book *Perfect Phrases for ESL Conversation Skills* by Diane Engelhardt.

## Sources

This activity was modified from  J-KURU Tokyo's language exchange activity.