The activity should work at most levels above elementary, as long as your students have some knowledge of past tenses, but it works best when they also know past continuous / progressive too. All you need to get things started is a sheet of plain paper for each pair of students.
The listening part comes first:
- A sentence is whispered around the circle of students. The last student to receive the message either says it aloud or writes it on the board. This can be a fun way to introduce a topic and activate schema at the beginning of a class.
It can be especially useful if you have to substitute a class at the last minute as it takes no preparation at all. Each student needs a blank piece of paper and a pen. Tell them they are going into a pre-historic internet chat room so they all need to decide on a nickname. Tell students that you are going to be the net and you will need to stand in the middle of the circle to exchange the papers. Explain that the net has gone a little bit crazy and they can’t send messages to specific people. If you have a big group ask a student or two to help you be the net in the middle.
- Either copy a battleships board for each student or, to save photocopying, just get them to copy a board onto some scrap paper or in their notebook.
- The reason for putting the vowels and the numbers 14, 40, 15, 50 etc is that they are the letters that students generally make mistakes with. If the problem letters are different for your learners, change them on your board.
- Select a group of words you want your students to practise and write them on the board.
Nominate one student to be in the hot seat, slightly apart from the rest of the circle. The rest of the group must think of questions to ask the student in the hot seat. They can ask anything they like, the only rule is that the student in the hot seat must answer the questions without using the words “yes” or “no”. Also ban “yeah”, head nods and shakes! For example, a student asks, “Are you wearing jeans today?” The student in the hot seat could reply, “I am” or “you can see that they’re jeans!”
By Jo Budden
Put students in pairs and give them a scene to act out. They are going to have a conversation using an invented language. Explain to your students that gobbledygook is a made up language that is total nonsense. The pair should act out the scene using the correct intonation as if they were really talking to one another. The rest of the class can watch and guess what the situation is. After, you could write out the real dialogue in English for one of the scenes.
(Thanks to James Stewart from the British Council in Barcelona for demonstrating this in a workshop.)
You can play them a few times. First play with the whole class and then try in groups (good for mixed ability groups).
1. Guess the word (can be used for abstract nouns)
Choose five words relating to recent conversational themes. Write sets of clues to help students guess the words. Play with whole class or teams. Use one word per lesson over five lessons or use all words in one session as a longer game.