Interrogation activity

Police interrogation activity

1 Introduction

This is a communicative activity in which some students role play as police interrogators, and one student plays the role of a person being interrogated. It may help to show a video clip from a cop drama of a police interrogation, and then to provide some vocabulary. I have used this for lower-intermediate levels, but with but it could be adapted to higher levels, depending on the vocabulary provided and the video clip used. This could be used for the following sentence forms:

• interrogative and wh-questions (especially lower levels)
• future tense and immediate future (e.g., what are you going to do with this cash?)
• verbs of planning and intention, including dependent clauses with them (e.g., what do you plan to do with these weapons?)
• future embedded in a clause with a past main verb (more advanced; e.g., what were you going to do with this cash?)

I only used one scenario since I used this for a lower level course; teachers will probably want to create other scenarios.

2 Instructions

You are a team of police investigators. Select one of your group members to be a suspected criminal. The rest of you will interrogate him/her about activities, lifestyle, suspected crimes, etc. Use y/n, wh-, and tag questions; use tags for seeking agreement or confirmation, and for expressing doubts, opinions, and suspicions.

Here's the scenario:

You suspect that the person is a bank robber. The police have found evidence in the person's home, including: large amounts of cash, guns, face masks, bags of money, and a plane ticket to Mexico.