The Perfect Way to Celebrate Friendship in the ELT Classroom

International friendship day is a holiday established by the United Nations in 2011 to celebrate friendship worldwide. The UN celebration is on 30th July. (This choice of date originated in Paraguay in 1958.) Some countries celebrate friendship on different days: In Spain, Argentina and Brazil it’s 20th July. In India and the United Arab Emirates, it’s the first Sunday in August. Regardless of the date, friendship is important for people everywhere.

How can you celebrate with your students?

One way you can explore this theme of friendship with your students is by using thematic quote cards to prompt class discussion. First, put learners into small groups. Then give each group a cut-up set of Friendship Quote Cards (download below) to look through. Allow learners to use a dictionary to check the meaning of unknown words. Go around monitoring to make sure learners stay on task. Once they are ready, write these sentence stems on the board and drill the correct pronunciation:

My favourite quote about friends is….
I really like it because…
My least favourite quote about friends is….
I don’t like it because…

Then ask the learners to choose their favourite and least favourite friendship quote. (There are as many different ‘correct’ answers as the number of students in your class. Everyone is different!) Once learners have done this, encourage them to compare their ideas with the ideas of other learners in their group, using the stem sentences to guide them.

What next?

If your students seem motivated by the topic of friendship, you can open this out into a whole-class discussion. However, if time is short, you may want to keep to small group discussions which you monitor as you walk around the classroom. If you want to express your personal preferences regarding your favourite/least favourite quote, do this at the end of the discussion so learners are not put off sharing their thoughts by you taking part too early in the discussion.

If we want our learners to read a classic story that describes a group of friends, we couldn’t do better than recommend ‘The Three Musketeers’ by the French writer Alexandre Dumas. The three Musketeer friends – Porthos, Athos and Aramis – have a slogan: ‘All for one and one for all!’ This describes their readiness to collectively help one of their number in need (‘all for one’) as well as each man being ready to work for the greater good of the group as a whole (‘one for all’)

As well as the Three Musketeers of the title, there is also the character of D’Artagnan. He arrives in Paris from the country and ends up, after many adventures, befriending the three Musketeers and himself becoming a Musketeer by the close of the story.

If you want to explore the differences between the four close friends in this story, give learners the Three Musketeers Grid (download below) and ask them to complete it with details about the different characters as they read.

Possible answers (Based on the Oxford Dominoes retelling):

• Athos: tall, good-looking (page 1, lines 19-20), likes sleeping (page 11, lines 4-5), disappointed in love (page 22, lines 7-14), likes eating and drinking (page 33, lines 8-10)
• Aramis: gets gifts from women, very private (page 2, lines 6-12), writes well (page 36, lines 18-25), likes pretty women (page 53, line 11)
• Porthos: expensively dressed, quick to get angry (page 2, lines 1-3); likes a good sword (page 10, line 7), strong (page11, lines 1-2), likes adventures (page 53, lines 12-13)
• D’Artagnan: wild, young (page 1, lines 17-18) brave (page 3, lines 2-3), loving (page 4, lines 13-15), loyal, helpful (page 9, 17-19), foolish (page 23, lines 1-4), innocent (page 34, lines 3-4)

To make this grid-filling easier, write on the board the information above in jumbled order. Students can check the meaning of unfamiliar words and match the phrases with the four main story characters, later reading the story to double-check their predictions.

A final (freer) speaking activity could involve learners matching the friendship quotes we mentioned earlier with key moments in the story, with learners explaining why they made these connections. (For example, ‘The W.B. Yeats quote matches the story opening because the three strangers D’Artagnan bumps into in chapter 1 become his friends later.’)

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Bill Bowler is a founder series editor, with his wife, Sue Parminter, of Dominoes Graded Readers (OUP). He has authored many readers himself. He has also visited many countries as a teacher trainer, sharing ideas about Extensive Reading. Bill has contributed to the book Bringing Extensive Reading into the Classroom (OUP).  Two of his Dominoes adaptations (The Little Match Girl and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) were Language Learner Literature Award Finalists. Born in London, he now lives in Spain.