Cooperative Strip Story

Each student holds one strip of a cut-up story and must reconstruct the correct sequence by listening and speaking — without showing their strip to anyone.

Procedure

1. Take a short narrative (8–12 sentences) and cut it into individual strips — one sentence per strip. Make one set per group of 4–6 students.
2. Distribute strips randomly within each group. Students read their own strip silently; no one shows their strip to anyone.
3. Students take turns describing or reading their sentence aloud, and the group negotiates the correct sequence through discussion. They must agree on the order without writing anything down.
4. When the group agrees, they lay strips in order on the table and read the reconstructed story together.
5. Compare against the original. Discuss any sequences the class found surprising or ambiguous.

Tips

• The no-showing rule is what makes this an Information Gap task rather than a puzzle: it forces oral description and genuine listening.
• The negotiation produces natural use of logical connectors, time expressions, and narrative cohesion devices as students argue for their ordering ("This must come before that because...").
• Choose texts with some sequence ambiguity — two adjacent sentences that could plausibly be reversed — to generate more negotiation. Predictable stories get resolved too quickly.
• Gibson's 1975 TESOL Quarterly paper coined this technique and is one of the earliest documented cooperative speaking tasks in the SLA literature. Distinct from Strip Story, which allows students to see each other's strips.