Patty Middleton, an ESL teacher with an MFA in ESL from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN, offers several suggestions as to the most effective ESL conversation role-play exercises you can do with your ESL students. Conversation is a major part of understanding a language, so these exercises should be an integral part of your instruction.

Meet and Greet
Create meet-and-greet exercises which will serve two purposes: They will help your students introduce themselves and they will help your students work on basic English skills in the process. Divide students into pairs and have them prepare a conversation in which they are meeting each other for the first time. Students should speak in English and have a conversation about who they are, where they have been and what they enjoy doing. The goal of the conversation should be for students to develop a role play that they can perform for other students.

Begin the year by having the students do factual meet and greets, in which they share real information. As students get to know each other, they can develop fictional meet and greets, in which they create other characters and share information about those characters with the class.

Role Playing
Develop exercises in which students are each given a particular role they must play. Middleton explains that this can fit into any ESL curriculum, because you can tailor the activities to the units you are teaching. For example, you can have pairs of students be a doctor and a patient when you are working on medical terminology; or a travel agent and a customer when you are working on travel vocabulary.