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Taboo Game
Why: Taboo is a commercially produced game which exercises verbal skills of paraphrasing, circomlocuting, as well as flexible & quick thinking; if you have one, you may try to use it, but you can also make your own taboo cards which will focus on vocabulary areas you have covered.
Materials: Sets of cards with target word& words to avoid using in defining target word
How: Cards are placed face down. One member of each team is asked to pick a card and describe the target word to his team without mentioning any of the other words listed on the card.
Points are won for words guessed within time limit.
The winning team is the one with the highest number of points at the end the game.
The opposing team acts as referee to check that words listed are are not used while a player is trying to describe the word to their team.
Note – This is quite a demanding game, even for native speakers but well worth investing some time to give the learners some useful language for paraphrasing or describing.
A very nice way of creating a more ’rounded’ lesson with this material, might be to record yourself and a colleague playing a few rounds, and using this as a listening, to get the students to ‘notice’ what type of language was used in trying to avoid particular words.
6. Proficiency Pursuit
This is a great game which I described in a post a couple of months ago and is based on the well known Trivial Pursuit game
If you would like to read about how to use with your classes, click on the link below to read the post.
Other games which fall in with “serious fun”
My Visual Delights and Spike Milligan post is in very much the same vein, although some people might object to that particular activity having anything to do with ‘heavy’ or ‘boring’ language areas…. but I don’t know… I think it’s up to the teacher to turn an activity this way or that and make it do whatever it is they want it to do.
The other post which is also related, is my “Yes, and… “ post to which similar comments apply as for the activity in my Visual Delights post.
I hope you can find some games you can use in this listing, and if you have any great ideas, I would love to hear about them!
Have some serious fun!]]>
Categories: Article, ELT Methodology
I love the idea of creating false definitions!!
“call my bluff”! I wonder what we would say in French… the “taboo” game is quite famous in my school, in fact with the intermediate learners I make them do the taboo game as a homework(they write a few words on cards with three of four taboo words each)and when they come to class I quickly check them up and we play!I found that when they actually write the taboo words, the game goes more smoothly, as everybody is bound to know the meaning of the words, if the students have the same level of French.
There is a paradox here. Especially teenagers and younger learners love it when their responses involves lies and exaggeration!
Excellent idea to get them to prepare the cards as homework, Alice. This means they are revising in a motivated way and, therefore, more likely to remember some of the vocabulary.
Marisa 🙂
Dear Marisa,
Thank you for sharing these great games.They are all times favourites. I like games in my class.Soon I’ll try the grammar cathegories as you explained.Tic tac toe is also a great revision game. I prepare cards and write the target language or the vocab we have been doing. We play taboo in the class. Sometimes I team them and ask them to prepare their own taboo cards for their opponents. They come up with great ideas.Although they are all related with the language we have been studying they like playing and compete to win.
Eva
Thanks for comment Eva and for being such a strong supporter of playful learning!
LOVE taboo in class. Just as I love popping a ‘post-it’ on students’ foreheads and having them guess which ‘celebrity’ they are. Too much fun. I try to start every class with a warmer in this direction. Get the spirits up and moving in a positive direction from the get-go.
Hadn’t heard of proficiency pursuit. Merci 4 the tip. -Brad