Many students who want to learn English as a second language often come across English dialogues at some point in their learning process. Dialogues are scripted conversations illustrating common situations one may encounter. These are an excellent tool for students as they act as a guide and help ease students into real conversations. Such dialogues can be used for various purposes such as role-plays to illustrate tenses, sentence structure and grammatical practices. Students can use such English conversations to practice and can also expand on them when comfortable and even try to use derivatives of Basic English dialogues in actual conversation. English Club TV offers a number of programmes to learn interesting situations for the dialogues for kids (“Kids In Action”) and adults (“Art of Conversation”).
The purpose of discussions is common practice in most classroom environments. One main advantage in this is that students have at hand a rubric they can expand upon during actual conversations. The main purpose of a practice dialogue is to give students confidence to face such situations in real life. For example, one may practice a conversation regarding making inquiries about how to get assistance while travelling to a foreign country, which international students can then put into use in their daily activities.
Dialogues can also be used to introduce new vocabulary, where students can practice the proper use of new words i.e. how to use them, and in what situations, and how to use derivatives of these words. It allows the student the opportunity to practice new words and terms without the stigma of having to use them incorrectly in public. Students can also write their dialogues and memorise them as a way of improving vocabulary skills. Dialogues also help students to improve their conversational skills by eliminating any fears they may have by allowing students to first practice with each other and learn from their mistakes.
Dialogues are also a crucial part of the online self-learning experience. Many websites offer sample dialogues students may adopt and build upon for various real life situations. An example of a website that uses English dialogues quite efficiently to improve student’s conversational skills is English Club TV. Found at tv-english.club, ECTV uses English dialogues as part of their shows. Shows such as “E-lab. Survival English” and “Say it Right” are designed to teach students the proper use of terminology, vocabulary and phraseology for situations they may face in real life. A remarkably practical example is the ECTV show “E-lab. Survival English.” It is aimed directly at international students and students learning English as a second language and visually illustrates various dialogues based on typical situations in which the students might find themselves.
