GENERAL TEACHING ACTIVITIES

When implementing any language teaching, use of interactive game tasks assists to maintain students’ interest as well as allowing for sufficient frequency of practice to allow for effective learning. As a player in the game, your responses provide important models of the language structures being targeted. This provides scaffolded support to assist the students when it is their turn to respond. Common tasks that can be used are as follows:

Bingo

Use a piece of A4 card or paper and rule it up so there are nine or twelve equal sized boxes. Each of the boxes should be filled with a stimulus reflecting the language skill being targeted. Examples of stimuli you could use are as follows:

• an action picture from a magazine when targeting present progressive sentences .. the boy is kicking the ball;
• the written form of such a sentence;
• vocabulary items from a similar category;
• a picture of a girl on one master sheet and a picture of a boy on another master sheet if targeting pronouns (eg. his/her; he/she)

Make copies of the master sheet. Cut out the boxes ensuring each person involved in the task will have one master sheet as well as cut out cards for each of the stimuli. The stimuli cards are turned over and players take turns trying to identify cards to complete their sheet. The language structure being targeted must be used before a card can be put on a player’s master sheet.

Pairs

Produce paired stimuli cards with either pictures for targeted language structures or the written sentences. Players take turns turning over two cards to find a pair. The language structure being targeted must be said when each card is turned over. Set a number of pairs needed to win the game.

An alternative activity varying the same procedure is to add a dice to the game. Students throw a dice. The number they roll corresponds to the number of card pairs they are allowed to turn over in any one go.

Snap

Again using paired stimulus cards, play the game Snap. As a stimulus card is put down, the player has to say the language target.

Go Fish

This is another though more complicated card game you can use. Using the paired stimulus cards, each player is given five cards with the remaining cards being placed in a central pile. A player asks another player is they have a particular card they need to make a pair. The player asking has to use the appropriate language structure. If the player being asked does not have the card, the first player picks up a card from the central pile.

The game finishes when the central pile is gone and no more pairs can be obtained from players asking for them. The winner has the most pairs.