CULTURAL JEOPARDY

For example:

• your country’s national flag;
• some pictures of famous places, famous people, and famous food
• a fold up map of your country
• anything that you think will inspire the students to learn about your country’s culture and help them through this slightly challenging game.

OBJECTIVES:

1. To give the students a change of environment where they can learn about the culture of another country without using the textbook.
2. To review and practice communicative English.

INTRODUCTION:

This is an activity where students formulate an answer for a question instead of a question for an answer. It can be used and adapted to review and practice communicative English of any content and level. This activity can be played in groups, pairs, for an English club or with individuals.

PROCEDURE:

• Explain to the class how the activity will be done. Use gestures and do examples with the JTE: On the board, put up cards representing different categories. The categories can be of anything. I usually put up five categories such as the following.

Each category has four questions however in the above example, category ‘WHAT’ and ‘HOW’ have bonus points. You can construct this however way you would like to. What makes this activity exciting is that the more difficult questions are worth more points. For example, “WHO 10” would be a lot easier than “WHO 40”. The questions you decide to make and the level of difficulty for each question should be carefully thought over before each class so you can tailor this activity to the students’ level as much as possible. Most importantly, since this activity is ‘Reverse Culture Jeopardy’ make sure the questions are related to your country or any other country.

• Students are divided into groups of however many you deem necessary. This usually works out to be about six groups of six. Within each team, an order is decided so students can take it in turns to choose and answer the questions. This will hopefully prevent eager students from dominating the group.
• Let’s begin the activity. Firstly, ask student number one from all groups to stand up. Choose a student to select a category and then ask the appropriate question. The first student to raise their hands gets the chance to answer the question. Students may discuss the answers in their group. Once a student answers the question correctly, ask student number two from all groups to stand up and repeat the process.

NOTES:

For this example I used, ‘what, who, when, where, and how’ but you can use whatever category you like. For example, sports, music, movies, TV etc. You could be even be more adventurous and make up questions using categories such as: English translation, where the JTE reads out a Japanese sentence and the students have to translate it into English, or vice versa with Japanese translation.