[bmcbridester]

Here's what I did in that situation teaching in Thailand:

1. Make 9 picture-cards (draw/clip-art pictures on 9X11 and put in plastic sleeves) examples: body parts

2. Model simple 2-line, 4-line, or 6-line dialogue with all cards - don't worry if they're overwhelmed at this point (don't write on board yet) example: A: What's wrong? B: My (body part) hurts!

3. Now choose just one card and model the convo very slowly a bunch of times until they're all whispering it along with you...

4. Hold the card, have one student stand up and do A's part, and you do B

Repeat with 5-6 students...

5. Give card to a student, then do A's part, have them do B's part. Repeat with 5-6 students...

6. Then have two students stand up, one holding the card, and have them do both A and B's parts together

Repeat with 6-8 pairs of students

7. Then ellicit the dialogue onto the board, and let them copy it in their notebooks.

8. Put student's in lines facing each other, and have them practice (with just the one body part still) the conversation, and when you say switch, have one line rotate down - you can do this for 10 minutes or so...

9. Have them sit down again, and take some time to go over each of the other cards again until they know all the body parts...

10. Then do this walk-around activity: hold one of the cards, have one student do A, and you do B... Then give the student the card, and have him stand up and pick someone to do the 'A' part. So the student with the card will do B, and it's up to him/her who does A. When the 2 students finish, have the student holding the card hand-off the card to the other student, and then the other student becomes B and has to find another student for A. Let this continue for a while - they'll get a kick out of it... After a while, start in with another card using the same process, then another, then another, until all 9 cards are circulating throughout the room. Amazingly, the entire class will be practicing your conversation, whether they realize it or not.

11. Now you can play a game. Tic-tac-toe works well, but after a few weeks, it gets boring and you should try connect 4 or something. Put each body part (or whatever) into a square of the board, divide into 2 teams. Pick two students from a team and if they do the dialogue correctly, they get an X or O.



With this format, you should have a good foundation, at least.
You can alter the cards to do any number of conversations...

Divide cards into 2 sections:

Where did you go on vacaction?
I went to the (place - ex: beach).
What did you do there?
I (action - ex: swam).

etc.


I hope this helps - good luck!