ESL Weekly Tip #3 - Yes, and...

This is WAY too common for foreigners here in Taiwan. You're sitting at a restaurant or a bar and someone comes up to talk to you. He, quite rudely, sits down at your table and demands you cheers him with your beer, which you do right before going back to working on reading your book, grading papers, or doing whatever it was you were doing. Next comes the fun part.

"Hello!"

Yes. He's talking to you. You KNOW how this is going to go. You KNOW this guy wants nothing more than to say he managed to talk to a foreigner. You KNOW this guy is not going to become a close, personal friend. Still...you minimally engage.

"Hi," is your reply. Not even 2 syllables like he produced.

A very awkward conversation follows until his friend comes and pulls him away, apologizing because he was drunk.

After thinking back on many of these conversations, I realized I usually give up because the person has nothing interesting to say. They ask you what you like to do, you say, "bowling," and they say, "Oh. Yes." How are you supposed to reply to that? More importantly, as a teacher, how do you get your students to actually have normal conversations?

The answer, my friends, is in 2 little words. "Yes, and...." This is something any person in improv knows. It is, in fact, the FIRST rule of improv. In improv, we are beaten with this rule. When we begin practicing it, we practice it with the actual words. Later, it becomes second nature to us to just accept everything we are given on stage. For ESL, it is a conversation gold mine. Here's how you use it.

Have your students line up in 2 lines. Designate who starts (which line) so it's easier. The first person walks up and says any non-question sentence:
"Here's your pizza."
"Your shoes look great!"
"This rice is delicious."

The person in front of the other line must reply. The secret is they HAVE to say, "Yes, and ______." They have to start with these two words. A normal conversation might be:
"Here's your pizza." "Yes and it looks great!"
"Your shoes look great!" "Yes and I bought them at Sogo."
"This rice is delicious." "Yes and I poisoned it, you dumb shit!"

Once they say their line, they move to the back of the other line (so they have a turn to do both).

Get in line with them and play this, too. After a few rounds, tell them you are going to do something different. This time, you reply to one of their replies. This time, we are going to see how far we can go with continuing to say "Yes...and...." The alternating conversation might go like this:

"Your shoes look great."
"Yes and I bought them at Sogo."
"Yes and I saw they were on sale."
"Yes and I bought 100 pairs so I never run out."
"Yes and that's a lot of shoes."

Notice at some points, we really wouldn't say "Yes, and" in the conversation. Still have them say it. It's really an exercise in getting them to accept what the person said, acknowledge it and add something to it.

After you do this with a person, have the students get in groups of two. Tell them any person can start, but after that first sentence, every reply must start with "yes, and...."

I did this on Tuesday in an adult class and Wednesday in a kids class. Both could do this for a long time.

Enjoy!
Matt