Number of Participants: At least 6 and as many as 30
Materials: students will need paper and a pen
Time: It takes approximately 40 minutes. The teacher should watch the clock. 10 minutes for initial prep and 5-8 minutes at each investigative station, and 5 or so minutes for follow-up.
Description: Tell the students – Last night between 6-8pm there was a bank robbery. There are 3 (or 2) suspects in this room. (Choose 2 or 3 suspects or ask for volunteers). These suspects have an alibi (same word in Bulgarian). All 2 or 3 of them were together at the time of the robbery, and they will tell you they were not near the bank. The rest of you are crime investigators. It is your job to interview each suspect to look for variations in their stories. Variations make them guilty.
Crime investigators: make three groups. Each group should come up with approximately 10 questions to ask the suspects. Give them 10 minutes for this task and help them think about what kinds of questions to ask.
Suspects: all of them sit together and begin to think up an alibi. Where were they from 6-8? Were there other witnesses? What did they talk about? If they went to a movie/restaurant, what did they see/order? Which theater/restaurant? Etc. Give them 10 minutes and allow them to take notes.
Teacher: Walk around the room helping the students come up with ideas. After 10 minutes send one suspect to each group of investigators and let the investigations begin. Investigators should take notes on the answers. Suspects should be encouraged to only give short, non-incriminating answers. After 5-8 minutes, the suspects switch groups without conferring with each other. If you have three groups, switch one more time.
This is an excellent exercise for developing questions. By asking the investigators to write down the questions, the teacher can correct errors before the game gets started. The teacher could also review question words and formation before getting started. This game starts slowly, but as soon as the second suspect arrives to be interviewed, things get interesting: students get into their roles and their questions become spontaneous – they begin using the language out of interest. Because everything has been previously written in English, it is easy to keep the conversation in English. At the end, I ask the groups to tell me what discrepancies they heard in the suspects’ stories and what strategies they used to highlight the discrepancies.
My students ask for this activity!
-Nancy W.
Filed under: Level: Advanced, Level: Intermediate, Skills: Conversation/Speaking
This game was a big hit in my classes as well. Thanks Nancy.
i’m doin this one tomorrow with my 8th graders. i’ll let you know how it goes posle
I’ve done this with 8th graders, and something about the age just turns this into chaos. But, I tried a different variant. I had the bank robbers leave the room and go out into the hallway to form their questions. Then when they came back the whole class asked each suspect their questions. It works much better for me, just to remove teenager insanity from the equation.