Just Desserts: A foodie drama about a chef gone bad

These scripts will give students the opportunity to confidently practise language in a safe and structured setting where they can enjoy playing roles and bringing the story to life. ... they'll be having so much fun that they won't even realise that they are learning

--David Farmer, NILE training consultant, theatre director, and author

Just Desserts is a short, original play about what happens when a teenager has to stand up to their boss, an overbearing celebrity chef. The engaging, suspenseful play hits on an important theme for students, how to stand up for yourself in a difficult situation. However, this play was written for English students to improve their communication and speaking skills.

As students read, practice, and perform these plays, they will learn:

• cultural contexts
• conversational moves
• intonation and body language
• high frequency lexical phrases and grammar patterns

Short enough for a project in a speaking class, but expandable to fill a whole elective class, drama unit, or theater club production, Just Desserts makes drama in the classroom a good thing

About the Play

• 6 characters, 8 scenes, about 15 minutes to perform.
• Language of the play is graded to A2+/B1 (intermediate) level, although the demands of performance may be higher
• In addition to the script, this book contains:
  • Preview activities
  • Pragmatics lesson on answering a false accustation
  • Advice on producing a play
  • Pronuncation tips
  • Glossary of theater vocabulary

About the Author
Savage, Alice: - Alice Savage comes from a family of theatre people. Her grandfather was a professor of theatre arts, and her father is a playwright. The Integrated Skills Through Drama series has given her the opportunity to bring together this family experience in the theatre with her love of teaching. In addition to the three plays in that series, Her Own Worst Enemy, Only the Best Intentions, and Rising Water, Alice has written many ELT books with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Wayzgoose Press. Alice has a Master of Arts in Teaching from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. She is currently a professor of ESOL at Lone Star College System, in Houston, Texas where she also does some teacher-training. She is grateful for the opportunity to spend time with young people who are exploring their own decisions about career and life.Hirschhorn, Steve: - Steve Hirschhorn MA., PGCHE., FHEA., has been teaching and training teachers since around 1980. He has worked in many countries and continues to deliver workshops and training events to teachers and others all over the world.Burns, Walton: - As a teacher I am a teacher and materials writer from Connecticut. I fell in love with teaching English in the Peace Corps in Vanuatu, an island chain in the South Pacific which was the basis for Bali Ha'i in South Pacific. I had the most amazing class of Francophone Melanesian students who were working to complete their high school degrees. They inspired me and led me to love teaching. Since then I've worked around the world and taught a diverse range of students from Russian oil executives who needed to improve their English for business, to Kazakh scholarship recipients off to study in American universities, to Afghani high school students on the FLEX exchange program and middle-school children taking an extra-curricular speaking class. As a writer I began selling lesson plans and activities on my blog in 2007. There appeared to be an actual and growing demand for my work. So I began seeking out some small professional gigs, mostly helping fellow teachers develop lessons for their classes. My school began using me for more and more lesson plan development and editing. After winning a few lesson plan contests, I came to the attention of the Nick Robinson Agency and was very successful there. I continue to work with Nick and ELTJam, as well as independently. I publish my own books and lesson plans, write for publishers, copy-edit, and design activities and lesson plans for language schools, including online lessons as well as face to face classes. Clients for writing and editing have included Oxford University Press, Macmillan, Pearson, Compass Publishing, 2LTI Testing and New Horizons Language Schools. Since 2015, I have been part of the leadership team of the Materials Writing Interest Section of the TESOL Association, the international association for English language professionals.