Example 2: email interview (pre-intermediate upwards)

Many magazines and colour supplements contain short celebrity interviews in which people answer a series of inconsequential questions designed to be revealing, amusing and entertaining in equal measure. This genre is a highly effective way of getting students to write communicatively.

The excerpt from an interview with Neil Gaiman (a cartoonist and graphic novelist) on page 116 is a typical example of this kind of writing.

To use this writing genre in class, we will first show students an example (real or invented) of this kind of interview and discuss how it is put together (a whole variety of questions are emailed to the interviewee, who can answer as many of them as they want). We can elicit a whole range of possible questions from students and write them up on the board - and as we do so, modify them so that they emerge in good appropriate English.

Students now work in pairs or groups choosing the questions they want to use and adding their own. We will stress that these questions should be sufficiently general to be answered by anybody (e.g. 'When and where were you happiest?'). While students are working on these questions, we will go round the class suggestions modifications, if appropriate.

Students now write a fair copy of their questions and send them to one of the other students in the class. They can do this on pieces of paper, perhaps designed to look like email screens, or, if they have email access, they can send real emails.

The interviewees now answer as many questions as they want to. Once again we can go round the room helping them with any difficulties they might have. They then 'send' the replies back to the questioners, whose job is to write up the interviews appropriately.

We can vary the activity by asking the questioners to turn the questions and answers into 'questionless' prose. For example, the first two utterances in the example above might be written as:

My idea of perfect happiness is reading under a tree on a summer's day.

My greatest fear is of something dreadful but unspecified happening to my children.

This kind of writing activity is a typical boomerang lesson sequence (see page 55) since once students are engaged, they have to activate their language knowledge before, at various stages, they modify what has been said or what they have written, and in so doing find themselves studying the construction of their texts.

There is no reason why the interviewees should be the students' classmates; if they can find other people to interview in this way, so much the better.

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