It's hard enough to make conversation in someone else's living room, let alone in someone else's language. I mean, invite any number of adults into a small, enclosed area and the first thing one of them might say will be, "Anybody got a beer?" After all, what makes for lively conversation, but loud music and a free bar?

Which was something I began to consider after about the fourth week of attempting to get my ESL 2 class to talk. Instead, I sweated it out (literally), placing them in my "innovative" circle configuration and hoping against hope that at some point, one of my brilliant topics would hit like a slot machine. But no. It was more like:

Me: So, what holiday do you like most in Vietnam and Cambodia?
Most of Class: [Shrug.]
Me: New Year's? Do you like New Year's?
Most of Class: [Nod.]
Me: When is New Year's in your country?
All of Class: [Silence.]

Until, of course I'd long for it to be my New Year's so I could pop a cork and put myself out of my misery.

But not one to rely on such means to solve a crisis, I had to finally face the fact that cultural holidays, what you do on the weekends (sleep, buy groceries), what you do in the summer (sleep, work, and buy groceries) and how you like your supervisor (very nice, fine) were not going to evoke the kind of conversation I was after.

So I had to ask: What exactly was I after? Indeed, what was a good conversation? Answer: A free-flowing, spontaneous, exchange of ideas. And why, I thought, is making good conversation often referred to as an art? Answer: Because it's really hard. It takes imagination and skill. We even identify those who have the skill as "good conversationalists" and invite them to our dinner parties. So I asked: What makes a conversationalist good? Answer: Confidence, lack of self-consciousness, and the ability to ask questions and convey genuine interest in the answers.

So, I concluded, the key to making good conversation was not in the choice of the perfect topic, as the textbooks would have you believe, but in creating a classroom atmosphere that resembled a really great cocktail party (minus the cocktails, of course). That is, I had to design activities that did what cocktails do, that would make my students relax, shed their inhibitions, make them want to ask questions and want to hear the answers. Most important, I had to create an atmosphere that made them have fun. Because if they were having fun, everything else would follow.

And, yes, I agree, cultural exchange is important in an ESL class, but there are ways to do it that are a lot more lively than asking someone, "What do you do on New Year's in your country?" Instead, I asked the Dominicans in my class to teach the Asians the meringue dance. I asked the Asians to teach the Dominicans their traditional dance - all in English of course and so the classroom was in fact filled with music and laughter and a lot of talking and dancing. In fact, it sounded, not like a class, but suspiciously like a party.

And rather than force my students to dredge up their past continually by demanding that they tell an autobiographical story, we played make-believe. My students assumed fictional roles, but always in pairs and sometimes in response to a fictional situation. For in- stance, they witnessed a crime ("This is a crime," I said and stole a student's purse.) Then, one student played "witness," one the "interrogator."

I gave the witness a 3 by 5 card with the "criminal's" name written on it, which was the name of another student in the class. The witness, in response to the interrogator's questions, had to describe the student whose name was written on their card, and describe that student well enough for the interrogator to eventually be able look around the classroom and identify who it was.

This gave the student/witness a reason to talk, and the student/ interrogator a reason to ask questions. I realized that if students had a purpose for speaking, other than, because-the-teacher-asked-me-to, students will actually want to speak.

More common to ESL classes, I also had my students play real-life situation roles like interviewer/job applicant, grocery store checkout clerk/ patron, eye doctor/patient, always in pairs and always preceded by a demonstration and list of necessary vocabulary.

And then one day, when I was introducing a unit on car buying, I thought, I've never bought a car without agreeing to a deal I regret for the full seven-year term of the loan, so how can I, in good conscience, teach this subject to my students? I thought then, why not just import the real thing? So I asked a car salesman to visit my class and sell my students assorted models of new and used Matchbox cars.

Sure enough, I found an affable car salesman (most of them are) willing to donate his time, and the whole exercise produced that same party atmosphere. In this case much of the class playing the spectators who called out suggestions to the pretend buyers, everyone laughing, and everyone having fun, including the salesman, who, of course, left me with a stack of business cards.

Next came a friend who taught my class CPR. And now I'm thinking of asking one of those friendly, techie guys who work at my local Radio Shack to come in and sell my students a DVD player. There are any number of possibilities.

And how has my role changed? Well, as you can see, I just play the host, wandering around the noisy classroom like I'm carrying a tray of hors d'oeuvres offering a canapé of a vocabulary word here, a Swedish meatball of encouragement there. And I always lead the celebratory toast.

Peggy Rambach, the author of Fighting Gravity, a novel published by Steerforth Press, has compiled and edited three anthologies of writing from the Asian community in Lawrence. She lives and writes in Andover, and teaches ESOL in Lawrence at the Asian Center of Merrimack Valley, Inc. She can be reached at prambach@aol.com