Best of Mastertalker Interactive Games and Activities
Not like me to actually have useful ideas on TEFLtastic I know, but as I ripped all these ideas off one TEFL e book I can hardly claim it is even as much an article as the other things that I have labelled as such. The book is this (not reviewed by me, hence my attempt to repay the freebie copy I got with this free publicity), and my best of selection are these:
Things in common
When asking students to find things in common (a classic TEFL activity that is great for class dynamics and language use and that I use in almost every class), get them to only ask 5 questions each and score one point for each of their questions that gets an answer that they have in common with their partner. They then change partners and do the same, tallying up all the points as they go. Whenever you stop the game or when they have spoken to everyone the person with most points is the winner.
Social butterflies
In another slight (but nice) variation on something I often do, students make arrangements to do things together (speaking, pretending to phone each other, by “email” with slips of paper, or with real emails with laptops- great for invitations language and Present Continuous for arrangements) but don’t write down what any of their new arrangements are. When you stop the activity, the person who has made the most new arrangements that the other people involved actually agree are so is the winner.
Sentence memory
This one makes something that I’ve never seen the point of suddenly useful. Students do the classic memory chains game “I went to the supermarket and bought…” (with each person repeating all the things in the list so far and adding one more thing), but making sure that they use a different container word (“A packet of…”, “A jar of…” etc). This also works for using lots of different determiners (“Loads of”, “A few” etc.) or measurements (“A seven dollar…”, “A 500 gram…” etc, good for making sure they miss off the “s” when using as an adjective like this).
Paparazzi
Students imagine they are a famous person and describe yesterday’s schedule, tomorrow’s schedule or their usual schedule until their partner guesses who they are. This would also work with Present Perfect for experiences (“I have had many girlfriends” etc), but you’ll need a class who will use their imagination and not take forever choosing which celebrity they are going to talk about.
Variation on 20 Questions
A variation that I have tried is to give points for each “Yes” they receive and then 5 points for finally guessing what it is. Their suggested variation on that is to let people continue as long as they are getting “Yes” answers, and then switch the person questioning when they get a “No”. This is perhaps not useful for students who take a long time to think.
Nice to meet you
When people are mingling asking questions about each other, they also pass on information they have learnt about others. They then go to the person they have just learnt about to check that information, then exchange information about others etc.
Life Swap
This is quite well known and is even in one of the Communication Games books, but they also suggest agreeing to swap your real houses (maybe a bit personal), and that made me think you could do the same for schools, parents, families, jobs etc, depending on the topic of the book.
Do you know them?
This is a variation on the old TEFL classic which is in turn based on the game show Mr and Mrs, where students are tested on their knowledge of each other. What is new here is the idea of using second conditional sentences, which make me think that you could easily use it for adverbs of frequency, Present Perfect, etc.
This ”non-article” is my idea of an acceptable rip off, as I at least put the effort in to select and put it into my own words, unlike some who think I should be grateful when they spend 1 minute copying an article that took me 5 hours to write, but am happy to hear other ideas on what “good rip offs” and “bad rip offs” would be.
