Job Discussion Forums

[eihpos]

Hi,

I have to do an hour long activity class - the topic is mrder mystery and the students are mixed level adults.

I've never done anything like this before and seems it seems a bit complicated. Does anyone have any tips or links?

Thanks!

[HLJHLJ]

I've done murder mysteries for reported speech, it worked pretty well. 1 hour isn't long though, and it could be tricky with mixed levels (how mixed?). There's loads of free lesson plans for it online, just search for esl murder mystery. Mine was very specific to the school so it wouldn't be helpful for you.

It does require a lot of planning. You need characters for every student, and you need to decide which characters are essential and which can be dropped if their are absentees. Give the most important roles to your best communicators.

Given the short time frame and the mixed level I think I would also have answer collection sheets with various levels of guidance on them, to help ensure the different levels collect all the information needed.

[Glenski]

What is the point of such a lesson?
What do you have to work with?

[fluffyhamster]

IIRC there's such an activity in Hadfield's Advanced Communication Games. (I never used it myself, but once observed a Chinese teacher of English spend most of an hour-long class explaining the vocabulary involved and setting the activity up, leaving too little time to play the actual murder mystery game).

You might find it easier then to run an activity where everyone's story (i.e. the background story) is the same, but where each pair of group fills in the ending for themselves and decides precisely who the killer is. An example is my "Thirteen Scary Slips" story (esp. as it's nearing Halloween!). Scroll down to near the end of the first post in the following thread:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=9143

You don't need to cut up the story into slips, you can just supply the sentences in jumbled order on a single sheet. (And you don't even need to jumble the sentences, if you want there to be more time for students to work on creating their various endings).

[eihpos]

Thanks Fluffyhamster - that's useful. I found something on onestopenglish.com on murder mystery, but it would only really work for students above pre - int and I know there willl be a few elementary in there. I can imagine it becoming a situation like you described with the Chinese teacher explaining the vocab for the whole lesson.

Glenski - As far as I know, there is no point in this lesson except to keep the students happy and let them have fun. I work for one of 'those' schools. Yawn!

[fluffyhamster]

The other problem with that sort of game is that the students would need to effortlessly mingle with everyone else and flawlessly relay the information on their card (short of reading it aloud or showing it to others), whilst remembering everything they were told by others. A bit like a giant and much more complex game of Cluedo, but without the nice clear board, pieces and clue cards. They'd then have to draw a watertight conclusion from all the disparate facts and data, a bit like Jessica Fletcher or Columbo on a roll: "It's all very simple, Detective: the fact that the Reverend's adopted daughter's name was Gertrude, not Tracey, and that at the age of 8 she was raised not on a potato farm but an orange farm, can only mean one thing: that her uncle isn't the janitor but a Wall Street banker, who blackmailed the Count, forcing him to take his own life, in order to effectively disinherit the Count's children of their shares in their second cousin's flamenco dancing empire, which was competing for premises with a proposed orange juice factory."

[Cool Teacher]

I have done weeks of murder mysteries with some old timeers I taught. They really enjoyed murder mysteries.

I did a few things. One thing that was fun was introducing Agatha Christie with some Wikipedia stuff. Introduced Miss Marple and Poirot and brainstormed some other famous detectives. Then an info-gap using things like, "Miss Marple is an _________ woman" with the blank being "English" and the Ss having to ask their partners. Then I photocopied the blurd of some mystery story graded readers and had Ss match the blurb with the titles. Then got them to pick a story they wanted to read...etc...
Lots of possibilities. Also you can maybe watch a movie of Murder on the Orient Express with them.