Another good reason for games?

I’ve written about my doubts about the real justifications for using games before, but there are also obviously some good reasons for using them. One I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that many games force our more inflexible students to cope in situations in which they don’t quite understand the rules but some others get it instantly. Sounds like the same stresses as real-life face to face communication in another language to me.

To put it another way, students who can cope with communication games are often the same ones who can cope with communication, and so there seems to be a good justification for sneaking in the former with people who resist them and have problems with the latter. I can’t track down the article I wrote on how to do so without them noticing, but the main tip is always call it an “activity” rather than a game.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 9:07 pm and is filed under TEFL games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.