At our school, we organize a monthly seminar in which all the teaching staff can share teaching techniques, classroom activities and so on.

Last week we had a very interesting discussion on how to teach Vietnamese through dialogues. One of the common mistakes that some Vietnamese teachers make is to teach new vocabulary items and grammar structures out of context, as a list of items. In fact, students learn better (and are more interested) when language is presented within a context. One way in which we do that is through fun, yet practical, dialogues. 

There are various ways a dialogue can be exploited to help students develop their speaking and listening skills. Students can read out loud, listen for main ideas or details, rearrange a scrambled dialogue, do a role play, reconstruct lines from picture or vocabulary clues, create a new, personalised dialogue by using the original as scaffolding, etc. There are so many ways to study a dialogue and make it fun!