One technique I made up to practice dialogues works quite well, as long as it is a dialogue between two characters only:1) Go to Page Layout in Word and set your document to landscape format (instead of portrait, which is usually the standard position)
2) Write the dialogue in a bigger font (such as Times New Roman 36) and centralized. Preferably each character �s speech should fill a single line.
3) Cut out the lines.
4) Distribute the lines to the students and ask them to try to organize the dialogue according to context. Tell them what the first line is.
5) Check to see if the order is correct. If it is, choose two students to read the dialogue out loud. Then, fold each line in half and lay the dialogue out on the table again, so that only the first half of each sentence shows.
6) Encourage volunteers to read the dailogue in full, completing from memory the missing half.
7) When they manage to do that, turn the paper halves, so that the end of each line, instead of the beggining, shows. Ask two otehr volunters to read the dialogue.
After so much effort and so many repetitions, usually students learn the whole dialogue by heart!
* It is very important for the dialogue to be centralized because only when you do so exactly half of the sentence shows when you fold the lines.
