The Questions Game

Evan Brankin

OBJECTIVES:

• To provide students with speaking practice
• To encourage students to use the language they know
• To help students acquire vocabulary through use

PROCEDURE:

At my visit school the JTE developed an excellent activity for reinforcing vocabulary, conversational skills, etc. We probably overused it, but it was still very useful, especially for review, or when a JTE is sick, yet you don't want to sacrifice a class to doing nothing, etc.

This activity could conceivably take only part of class, but due to its nature it is far better suited for an entire class period. You will need to prepare vocabulary cards before hand, and will need multiples of all the major words. The basic principle of the game is that the students come to the ALT and ask the ALT a question in English about any subject they can think of. The ALT would then give them a vocabulary card, which the student would take back to his or her lunch group. The students would continue asking questions either until there was only a little time left, or until the cards ran out, at which point they would begin (if they hadn`t already) constructing sentences from the words they received. The sentences are awarded points based on how long they are (generally a point per word) and all the sentence points are added up to find the winning group at the end of class. The competitive aspect will ensure that the kids get into it.

In more advanced forms of the activity several techniques generally place more stress on teaching the students to be creative, thus freeing them from using the textbook for every question, while others will force them to think more about grammar and which type of words they want to use. Several tactics can be used either separately or all together.

1. When asking the questions, make it a rule that students must use grammatical points from a certain page, reinforcing what they've already learned. Or make it so they can NOT ask from certain pages, forcing them to think up new or different questions

2. When asking the questions award extra cards, or extra points, to students who ask original or unique questions. Not all students can accomplish this, but the smarter students in each group will vie with each other to make the best sentences and help their group.

3. When handing out cards, divide the cards by grammatical parts of speech and mark them with various colors. Make blues into nouns, reds into verbs, etc. Then have the students pick which color (in English, of course) they want to choose after they ask their question. Forces them to consider which grammatical parts of speech they need, as well as consider what vocabulary their group has and what vocabulary of the cards they can pick is best.

4. When tallying the final scores, have the ALT give out a massive single bonus to whichever group writes the best sentence. The ALT can use whatever criteria he or she desires, but I have found it best to stress excellent sentences and creative sentences. Thus the first time, the group that makes the sentence, "I am a zebra," would be awarded for creativity when all the others made sentences like "Tom goes to school." The other students will immediately catch on that fun sentences will get them points and begin making them as well, at which point you can make longer, or better written sentences the goal, etc.

NOTES:

Generally the ALT would handle the questions, and the JTE would go around helping the students write their questions, answering questions about the meaning of new words, etc. However, if you're strapped for time you can speed this process up by having the ALT and JTE distributing cards, and then having both answer questions.