Theme: the role of games in teaching speaking for a2 level learners c0ntent introduction

What’s Wrong With Me?

A game where everyone gets sick! . This is a great game when practising vocabulary related to illness. Write out different illnesses onto sticky notes, or use these handy flashcards, and stick them onto learners’ backs. Learners then walk around the classroom, asking advice for their illness from classmates. Based on this advice, learners should try and work out what their illness is.

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4. Scrambled words

A fun game that tests vocabulary, grammar and spelling. A triple threat! Write a sentence up on the board with words in the wrong order and include one misspelling. Get your learners to work in teams to try and get the sentence back into the correct order again and to find the word that is misspelt. The team that raises their hand first and that has correctly rearranged the sentence and found the misspelt word gets a point.

5. What am I?

Split the class into teams. Get learners to take it in turns to come up to the front of the class, facing away from the board. Pick an item or object to put up on the board that the rest of the class can see, but not the learner. You could use these Alphabet Cards. Each team has to try and describe the object on the board to the learner without using the word in a set amount of time. Keep playing until at least one person from each team has come up to the front to try and guess the item.

6. The Mime Game

Get a set of actions, like these Verb Cards. Get a learner to come up to the front of the class and act out a different action from one of these cards, like eating or swimming. A point goes to the first person to guess the action.

7. 
   Hangman
   

The game where a life is in the balance (the life of a fictional stick man, but still, important all the same). This is a fun game that can break up the day, or be used at the end of the day to kill some time (but hopefully no fictional stick men). Pick a word and draw out dashes to represent each letter. Learners then have to try and guess the letters in the word; get it right, they fill in one of the spaces, get it wrong, and you begin to draw the image of a hanging man. Learners need to correctly guess the word before the image of the hanging man is completed. If you’re dealing with a big group, you can always break it up and have learners playing within their tables. This gives more learners a chance to get more involved.
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