For a teenager-friendly extended speaking task ‘alibi’, this handout is great for getting students communicating in English. The premise involves a group of police, who have to find discrepancies amongst the suspects’ evidence, and the suspects, who have to come up with and defend a watertight alibi.
1. Copy one handout for each individual student.
2. Put the students into two groups of equal numbers; the criminal gang and the police. A requirement for this task is for the groups to be separate from each other during the preparation stages, so try and take the criminals outside or to a different room.
3. Focus students' attention on the instructions. Tell the groups that this is their activity aim: Police: think of good questions to find out what the suspects were doing the previous night. The aim is to find discrepancies between the criminals as evidence. Criminals: Think of as many details they can to create a watertight alibi that everyone agrees to.
Allow students lengthy preparation time to prepare for the first interview.
4. Monitor the students, providing language input or error correction when necessary. When the preparation is over (15-20 minutes), bring the two groups together and allow police to interview the suspects.
5. Make When the interview has run its course, put the groups together again and separate the two. Tell police to find differences between the suspects' stories and tell suspects to compare what the police asked so they can improve their alibi.
6. Bring the two groups together again. Do the second round of interviews and see if the police can expose the suspects by finding holes in their stories. If necessary repeat step 5 again and do a third interview. Organise a plenary session at the end of the activity and find out if the police could find enough evidence.
