Jul 9, Fun ESL Games – Make Lessons Fun with ESL Games!

One way to make your lessons more enjoyable is to have a bunch of ESL games you can use. To save you searching the web, here are some of my favorites.Many of the popular TV game shows are syndicated worldwide so students will know them. They can easily be adapted to use with any grammar point or vocabulary theme. Jeopardy is easy to use in class and is great for practicing question forms. You can write the answers, or for more class involvement, you can get your students to write answers for the other team to make questions. Great idea, group work, good fun, and less work for you! Even adults like to move around during long lessons, and with younger students it is even more important to get them active. Games involving mime can be used with vocabulary and are also great if you are teaching progressive tenses. Put the students into teams, get one person to mime something and have the others guess what it is. Another version of this is to have students draw pictures on the board for their team to guess. Instead of a boring quiz, why not make it into a sports game. Draw a plan of a football field on the board and ask teams questions. When a team gets a question right, move the ball one step nearer touchdown! This may take a while as it goes backwards and forwards, just like in a real game. This can be adapted to any sport, simply use the scoring method from the sport instead of giving straight points. My students love this one! Get each team to draw a cartoon character to represent them. Draw a grid of lines across the board and stick each character at the start of the grid. Ask ‘category’ kinds of questions, for example, Name 5 things that are always white. Name 8 things with wheels. Name 5 positive and 5 negative personal characteristics. This is great way to revise vocabulary from a previous class. The first team to write all correct answers moves 2 points along the grid, the second team moves one. The first team to reach the end of the grid are champions! This has different names, but my students called it Two Chairs and it was a great favorite at the end of the lesson. I wouldn’t do this as a warm-up as it can get a little crazy! Two teams, two students sit in chairs with their backs toward the board. The rest of the teams describe or act words you write on the board for their team-mates to guess. First one to guess it gets a point.

When you are playing ESL games you do need to be sure that your students understand the rules and that they know your decision is final! If you use some of these ideas, your students will have fun and learn at the same time.

Jul 18, Improve Your Lessons with ESL Vocabulary Games

I've seen some really boring vocabulary lessons, from teachers who ignore ESL vocabulary games.

Uninteresting reading activities, followed by lists of words to define or translate. Sometimes students having to do spelling tests.

Although these vocabulary activities can be productive, if done incorrectly, they aren't very exciting for students.

Here are some suggestions of how to use ESL vocabulary games.
Most people have a competitive side to their personality. If you put your students into teams for any quiz or test then they will be likely to work together to try to beat other teams. Even a simple quiz becomes much more fun this way.
Don't use the same game all the time. Hangman and Hot Seat (where two students sit with their backs to the board, you write a word on the board, and the teams have to describe the word for the two students to guess) are popular with teachers because they are easy.

Try to find some different games to use to stop your students (and you!) becoming bored.

An example of a quiet game, which works with individuals or in pairs or groups is word transformation. Ask students to give you a four-letter word and write it on the board. Then ask for another four-letter word and write this underneath the first, leaving space between them.

Then ask your students to change the words, one letter at a time, each time creating a new word. The object is to reach the second word with the least possible number of moves.

Obviously, this is best for higher-level classes but it can bring up some good new words.

Games with movement are good to break up a long class (to break up means to put short activities in between longer ones).

You could stick words and definitions (or translations) around the room and have a race to see which individual, pair, or group can match the most pairs.

Or you could give the students the words and definitions and get them to find the person who matches with them. This is also a good technique to get students to work in different pairs.

Memory games work well with vocabulary. You could have some objects on the table and give students 5 minutes to find out the words for them together (if they don't already know) and to remember as many as they can.

You can also use pictures for this, getting students to look at the picture then describe it, or answer questions about it.

Storytelling is a great classroom favourite of mine, and of my students. I get a bunch of unconnected words, including nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions.

I then get students, in groups or pairs, to write a story using as many of the words as they can. Sometimes I award points for each word and turn it into a competition.

I have also had the students work in pairs, with one reading the story and one acting it out.

Vocabulary activities don't have to be boring. With a few new ideas and a little imagination, ESL vocabulary games can make your lessons much more lively and fun.