An additional piece of material I use for my conversational class is a book of pantomimes or some illustrations that are sequenced with a bubble above the head of the figure or figures illustrated. I like the fact that it adds to the lesson as a means of getting the student to create a dialogue, if there is one to be developed between the characters or create a summary of what the story is trying to state as a whole.

Today I used a series that were taken from an old collection of Mad cartoons. One such cartoon showed the story of man who while in his zodiac, discovers there is an air leak. He bends over to cover the hole with his finger but as soon as he does that he sees a shark fin going by. What he does then is open up to the student’s interpretation and it gives the students a chance to debate the final outcome.

When the cartoons are with no dialogues or captions they can be interpreted differently by the students and they should be encouraged to come up with whatever they think is being said. Sometimes there are images in the bubbles above the characters and they can be interpreted differently too. If one wants to pursue this exercise more deeply, the student can be asked why he selected one interpretation and not another, using sentences preceded with “I think he thought that because…” This would be an excellent opportunity for the teacher to here the student use reported speech or apply some grammatical base to the exercise.

The student might like to attach some dialogue between the characters of the cartoon and compare their results. The same exercise can be used by incorporating some grammatical forms and the student can be encouraged to say something that begins with, “I would have liked to see..”. This way he can use a modal in the present perfect and express something hypothetical.