Page 310 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 20: Getting Youth on Your Side: Coping with Young Learners
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Adapting real games
Very often you can take a game you already know and tweak it for the TEFL market. For example, I use these:
✓ Battleships: In this game, you have a grid onto which you secretly mark off certain squares as the location of your battleships; your partner does the same on another grid. For the purposes of language practice, the grid references can be made up of numbers that sound similar and tricky letters of the alphabet, such as those in Figure 20-1. When the students try to guess the location of each other’s battleships they’re forced to pronounce their numbers and letters very precisely. For example:
Student A: Is there a battleship at Q13? Student B: Is that Q or K?
A
E
I
K
Q
G
J
H
W
13
30
X
14
40
X
X
15
50
X
16
60
X
100
Figure 20-1:
Using ‘Battleships’ to teach letters and numbers.
✓ Bingo: You can play bingo in lots of different ways. The traditional approach of course, is to have numbers on your card and then to mark them off as soon as they’re called out.
However, you can create your own bingo-style cards with pictures on instead. So if you’re teaching children about animals, have pictures of animals on the cards. It works well with food, clothing and furniture too.
This game gives very good practice in listening skills. Be really crafty and instead of calling out the word, just hold it up in writing. This kind of variation pushes the students to recognise English words in writing.