Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Chapter 20: Getting Youth on Your Side: Coping with Young Learners 289

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?

Figure 20-1:

Using

‘Battleships’

to teach

letters and

numbers.

13

30

14

40

15

50

16

60

100

AE

XX

X

X

X

IKQGJHW

✓ 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.