A roleplaying game takes place in our shared imaginations. For it to work at its best there needs to be a rich dialogue between the teacher and the students. The whole game is one giant exercise in speaking English, from describing what your character does, to interacting with other characters to achieve goals. When students are participating in a game, they lose their inhibitions and insecurities about making mistakes, enabling them to talk freely and learn faster. There is no greater way to practice spoken English.

Discussing the adventure afterwards is a crucial part of empowering students. We discuss what we did, what we didn’t do, and how it affected our goals. The aim is to help students gain enough confidence in their abilities to express their thoughts and opinions. There will always be thousands of things to discuss about each adventure, the encounters and setbacks the students experience along the way, and how they overcame them. Sometimes we will ask students to present in front of the class, and with enough confidence, maybe one day run an adventure of their own!

There are no written assignments for our Speaking Course, but we do encourage students to get creative with their own ideas for adventures, which they can present to the teacher and the group at the beginning of every lesson. If we’ve done our job well, you will have trouble getting your child to stop talking about their adventures!