TEFL Lessons: Games (Part 2)

I recently shared a few of my favourite TEFL games with you. Games in lessons occupy a unique place in the classroom – they can liven up your lessons and make you the school hero.

Last time, I wrote about the classic Japanese-turned-TEFL game Shiritori, and a very simple but fun alphabet game. This week, I have two more games, both of which have proved very popular with younger and lower-level learners.

Hangman

Ah, I spent many science lessons playing hangman back in secondary school. I know nothing about atoms, or chemicals, but I can come up with some cryptic hangman words.

If you are not already familiar with hangman, it just requires having one person who decides on a word, while the rest of the class tries to guess the letters contained in that word. For every letter that is not in the word, part of the hangman’s body or the hanging apparatus is drawn.

The person who decides the word should enter the relevant number of dashes for each letter on the board so that everyone can see. You can limit the words to certain categories or impose a time limit to make things more tense. If my explanation isn’t clear enough, try it out here. This game is very useful for vocabulary and spelling practice.

I went to the market…

This game can help your students in many ways. It teaches them sentence structures, use of the past tense, countable and non-countable items, and can improve their vocabulary, pronunciation and memory.

The basic idea is that each person adds an item to a list. The sentence begins with the words “I went to the market and I bought…” Each person then repeats the sentence and adds an item (“I went to the market and I bought some flowers, an egg, a pair of shoes…”). Remembering the order of the items after a few rounds becomes very difficult!

To add a bit of variation to this game, you can change the original sentence to something in a different tense (“I will buy…”), or on a different theme (“When I go on holiday I will take…”).

Do you have any TEFL games to share with us that have been successful? Share them here!