First Lesson Warm-Up for Upper Intermediate to Advanced Students:

The following lesson is an example of a pre-orientation warm-up exercise designed to improve familiarity between students, while simultaneously allowing the teacher to assess their particular English levels. For the purpose of brevity, occasionally students (plural) shall be referred to as Ss, students (singular) shall be referred to simply as S and the teacher referred to as T.

Involves: Critical thinking, improvisation, anticipating questions, dialogue trees, some chunking and repetition and being able to detect lies by listening to tone and observing body-language.

Students: Usually this game is suitable for 6-12 students. For huge classes (say 20+), split students into groups and have them do the game just within their groups.

Description of exercise: The game is called ‘Detective’ or ‘Two Truths and One Lie’. Its main purpose is to get students critically thinking and to help them express themselves. Response time and the ability to improvise an answer to an unexpected question will also be gauged.  Ss should be informed that the lies should be neither too obvious (“I’m an alien!” I’m a North Korean spy!”,etc), nor too boring or subtle (“my age is 18” when student is 17, or “my name is Yong-Ho” when it’s really something else.) Ideally, the answers should lead to dialogue trees instead of being monologic answers that don’t lead to further conversation. For this reason, simple statements about age and names are also discouraged. First, T should give an example of how to play. For myself I usually tell them “I am from New York City, my hobby is painting and drawing comics and I have a younger sister.” The follow-up questions should follow the “who, what, why, where, what, how” (or Five W’s plus One H) pattern. One student may ask “what’s your favorite place in New York?” to which I’ll answer naturally and quickly “Central Park.” Another will ask me the plot of a comic or a description of a painting I’ve done, to which I’ll tell him the answer to that too. When a student asks about my “sister”, maybe what her name is, I’ll feign an awkward response and maybe snap my fingers in the air as I try to recollect the name of a person who doesn’t exist. Ideally, the students should pick up on this. Perhaps for more advanced students, I hesitate only for a moment and then tell them an unusual name like “Ruby.” This should lead to more critical and probing questions, like “where does she go to school?”, “what are her hobbies”, etc.  At this point I get caught out (T please don’t try to be too smart or you will completely miss the point of the set-up).

Students will go around in a circle and attempt the game. It has always been successful and it sometimes produces a lot of laughs when students have to answer a follow-up question with a ridiculous answer (eg: “my dog’s name is Kimbap!”). Pay attention to their reaction time and their ability to detect lies and build dialogue trees from information provided.

Conclusion: Students become better acquainted with one another, teacher has quick indication of students’ levels.