Games in the EFL Classroom

Are you struggling with student motivation? Would you like to engage your students while learning English? Do you want students to become autonomous in their own learning process? Why don’t you try games?

Even though there might be some discussion regarding the importance of games and how central to the learning process they are, many consider games an effective way to encourage student interest for language learning. Games should not be seen as a marginal activity, but as a central point to the teaching programmes.

Since games provide a context to the use of language, they should be considered as an opportunity to practice what students have learnt in an intense and meaningful way.

Advantages of Game Usage

You can use games at any time during you class:

– at the beginning, as a fun warm-up activity or even as revision from last lesson;

– during the practice and production stages of the lesson, as a reinforcement of what the students have been learning,

– you can even give those “fast finishers” (who always end the activities first than anyone else) the opportunity to do some extra practice in a game while they wait for the rest of the class to finish;

– at the end of the lesson, just as a consolidation activity, which will make students think about what they have learnt for just a bit longer.

Games can involve a wide variety of learning styles.
Students are active participants
Increases motivation.
They provide meaningful language use.
Encourage student interaction and communication.
Promotes communicative competence
Also, you can always adapt or create your own games.

The hardest part is getting started, you will see that once you get “it flowing” you will truly experience the benefits of the use of games in the EFL classroom.

Simple Classroom Games

Here are some examples of simple games we chose to share with you. They are divided in levels (which doesn’t mean you can’t use them in a different level) and there are games that can be used to practice grammar, vocabulary or even the four skills. Just think of what you want to focus on and adapt the game to your students’ needs.

Elementary level

Pictionary- Teacher gives student a slip of paper with a word on it. Student then has to draw the word for the other students to guess.

Pelmanism- Teacher gives students several cards with pictures/words on them. Students place the cards on the table with the picture side down. They take turns flipping the cards in order to match pairs. The pairs can be picture/picture, picture/word or word/word, depending on what you are focusing in.

Bingo- Teacher asks students to draw a chart in their notebooks, or provides the chart himself. Students then draw/write different pictures/words in each square. Teacher says/shows a picture and students cross it if they have it in their chart. The first student to cross all the squares says “Bingo” and is the winner.

Intermediate level

Word association– Students take turns saying a word that is somehow connected to the previous word, e.g. saucer, cup coffee, tea, India etc.

Picture dictation- Teacher (or student) describe and student draws. This is a great activity for body parts, drawing monsters.

Running dictation- Teacher places a text somewhere in the classroom. Students work in pairs: Student A reads the text and runs to Student B, who writes what Student A dictates. The first pair to finish writing the text with less mistakes wins.

Advanced level

Countdown– Students are given 3 vowels and 8 consonants. In groups, students make as many words as possible within a given time limit, e.g. 3 minutes.

Who shall survive?- Teacher tells the students that they are stranded on a desert Island and only one of them can be taken off in a small boat. Each student creates a character with a given occupation and think of reasons for being saved. After a “campaign” speech all the students vote for the most convincing character, who will be saved and therefore win the game.

Story consequences- Teacher divides the class into groups of 8 (or 4 if the class is too small) and tells them that they are going to write a story without communicating with each other, by folding the piece of paper after writing each sentence, according to the following formula:

Fold 1: (time)…

Fold 2: (place)…

Fold 3: X (male character’s name) met…

Fold 4: Y (female character’s name)

Fold 5: He said…

Fold 6: She said…

Fold 7: The consequence was…

Fold 8: and…

At the end, the class can determine which story was the funniest, and therefore determine the winning team.

Internet Resources for Games

Are you an advocate of classroom language games? Do you want to explore more about the ‘gaming’ world? Here are some useful links. We are sure you will find them very advantageous to your language learning classroom!

http://iteslj.org/c/games.html

http://www.esljunction.com/esl_games/

http://www.eslcafe.com/idea/index.cgi?Games

http://www.teflgames.com/links.html

http://www.english-4kids.com/games.html

http://www.quia.com

http://www.eslkidstuff.com/OnlineGamesMain.htm

http://www.englishclub.com/esl-games/

http://www.rong-chang.com/game.htm

http://a4esl.org/