Xtranormal.com & EFL young learners

www.xtranormal.com is a website you can use for free where you or your students can type in lines of dialogue and instructions for how the characters should move and so easily make an animated “movie” from that script. The site is popular with kids and seeing their words spoken on screen is a great motivator. Xtranormal is especially useful for livening up textbook dialogues or getting students to write similar conversations, and also has various other uses including those that are described below. Here are some tips on how to get the greatest possible use of English out of this great site:

Different ways of choosing the dialogue

The simplest way of deciding what the characters say is to get students to read out the textbook or other prepared dialogue while the teacher types it in. The students then decide on which movements, sound effects etc to add. Note that you can only have two characters, so you might need to rewrite the dialogue to make that possible (e.g. eliminating one character’s lines or having one character say the lines of two people). Apart from the dialogue from the book, it is also possible to use film scripts or lyrics from songs where more than one person is speaking (e.g. duets or She’s Leaving Home by the Beatles). The advantage of using a dialogue that is already prepared is that it probably ties in exactly with the syllabus of the course. The disadvantage is that just reading out the script is not very fun or communicative.

The opposite extreme is to let students make up the whole dialogue, either in groups on different computers or deciding together and having the teacher or a student at the front of the class type it in. The disadvantage of this approach is that the language used is completely random, and there is the possibility of students choosing rude words or other things that you don’t want used in class.

The middle, and probably the most useful, way is to give them words and phrases that you want to use and tell them to make dialogues with at least one from that list used in each line. If you want to use the textbook dialogue later in the lesson, they can go onto compare their version with the textbook dialogue and spot the similarities and differences. To use the site this way, you’ll probably need to prepare a worksheet with a list of words or expressions they have to use. You can make them use them in the order on the worksheet (maybe the same order as the dialogue in the textbook) or let them choose. You could also prepare the words and expressions to use as a pack of cards, with them having to use the card that they take in the next line of dialogue. If that will be too difficult, let them take three and choose one of those three to use.

Other restrictions that don’t involve telling them the actual language to use include telling them where the conversation should take place, giving roleplay cards setting the scene, giving them just the first and/ or last line and letting them make the rest up, and telling them that you are going to give points for the most polite conversation.

Different ways of inputting the dialogue

The simplest way is for the teacher to type it in, with the students shouting out suggestions. The teacher can choose between the various suggestions by which option they think is best, by a class vote, or just to make sure that everyone gets an equal chance to contribute. If your class is too large to allow you to take suggestions from everyone each time or you think that it will descend into chaos, you can ask people or teams to take turns. Another option that might improve the involvement of all students is to ask teams to work together to come up with suggestions and then choose the best option.

Any of the methods for inputting the data that are described above can be done with a student taking the role of the teacher. You can improve the amount of speaking in these situations by asking students to describe the backgrounds and people they want to use, practising all the actions before allowing them to choose which one, or asking them to describe the exact position or appearance of the button they want use to push. A good rule to use most of them time to improve the amount and quality of speaking is to ban pointing at the screen.

If you have the technology, it is also possible to get students to work together on computers in groups of two to four (or at a stretch five or six). Language they can use when interacting includes things like “Click here”, “Are you sure?”, “It’s my turn to decide” and “Shall we upload it now?” You can increase the amount of communication by telling the person in control of the computer that they can’t decide anything but only listen to their team mates, and that people should describe what they want done rather than pointing at the screen.

Whether they type it in in groups or you or a student does it for the whole class, it is possible to get students to write out the whole script on paper or in a word processor programme before inputting it into Xtranormal. You could perhaps get them to act it out as suggested below and only introduce Xtranormal at the final stage of the lesson as a nice surprise.

Worksheets to go with Xtranormal

As well as a list of words and phrases to include in the dialogue as suggested above, worksheets could include the actions etc that are available (so that you can explain and act them out before, so that they can discuss in groups, or so that they can add them to their scripts on paper before you type it in) and useful incidental language like “Press the Action button please”.

Activities before using the site

You could get students miming the language that you will want them to use in the script- something which ties in nicely with introducing the actions that the characters on the site can do. Another way to link in with this is to brainstorm things you can show by pointing before introducing the list that is on the site. You can also do the same thing with facial expressions.

Activities after using the site

Students could act their scripts out (perhaps with the director cueing them for dialogue and gestures from a printout of the script), suggest improvements for the site, or design new characters, backgrounds, actions, noises etc (good for extra vocabulary of those areas).

Potential problems and solutions

Especially if you have a slow connection, the site can take a long time to upload your dialogue so that you can see it being “performed”, and occasionally completely freezes up. You will need to plan something to do while the students are waiting, e.g. drilling the dialogue (and perhaps getting them to say other things that will happen like the characters’ actions and appearance as well), deciding what you will do next (you might need a worksheet like the one suggested above with the options printed out for this). Speed problems might make it especially difficult to use this site if you have a slow internet connection, but another solution is to prepare and upload the first half of the dialogue before the class and get the students to continue it. This will also help demonstrate what they are going to be doing. If speed is a real problem, you can demonstrate a whole film, e.g. one you have prepared, and get them to write scripts for similar films. You can then type these in before the next class, when you can show them the finished films.

The site is designed for Internet Explorer 7 and an error message comes up if you are using an older version of the browser, but just clicking OK and continuing seems to work fine in this case. I have tested other browsers such as Firefox and Safari.

There are a few things in the programme that are rude, such as being able to make the characters make rude noises and gestures. If you are giving them a list of movements etc to refer to, you can easily edit these out of that worksheet, or you can just control this by inputting their suggestions yourself or monitoring students’ computer use for exactly this. The same issues could come up with words they choose and when watching the example films on the site.

Because the voices are computer generated their pronunciation isn’t the best and there are some things like place names that they can’t cope with at all. The British voices tend to sound less robotic than the American ones. You might want to type in possibly difficult words from the textbook script to see how the site copes with them before the class, and change the dialogue to avoid any particularly bad mispronunciations. Alternatively, you can ask the students to suggest alternatives once they hear how badly mispronounced those words are. You can also get them to critique the pronunciation more generally for some extra pronunciation practice, perhaps getting them to do the most robotic, American and then British accents for the same script.

Misc

You can see and print out a worksheet I prepared for and used with 8 to 10 year old children here:

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/yl/challenges-1/xtranormal-dialogue-writing/

It went very well, with lots of use of the language and recall of it in future lessons and a rush to copy down the website’s address so that they could try it at home.

Any other suggestions for what to do with this site or ideas for other sites that can be used in a similar way in Comments below please.