TEFL Online Pro

9.1 Importance and effectiveness – 9.2 Student engagement – 9.3 Games and activities

Paul Murphy

Congratulations on successfully passing the eighth module! 🙂

In this EFL Classroom Games ninth course module, we will be taking a look at (9.1) Importance and effectiveness, (9.2) Student engagement, (9.3) Games and activities. It is essential that you thoroughly read through all the information presented within this module, before then completing the Module Quiz and proceeding to the tenth module. If you have any module-related questions, please contact your personal tutor through the CONTACT LESSON TEACHER button. Good luck and we hope you enjoy completing your ninth module! 🙂

(9.1) Importance and effectiveness.

Games are one of the most important components in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching classrooms as they include activities which have goals and objectives, and introduce a sense of fun into the classroom.

Language games, when used correctly, can be used as teaching aids which minimize monotonous repetitions in the lesson, and can be used to fill in time – especially relevant when teaching classes that are in excess of two hours. In a relaxed environment, which language games encourage, it is mostly possible that real learning takes place and furthermore, learners are able to use the target language that they have been exposed to and which has been practiced earlier by the learners. Also, when presented effectively, language games create a competition positively among students who are involved in the language activity.

The benefits of using games in a foreign language classroom can be seen in the fact that learners are provided with a lot of benefits through using them. Games provide learners with the opportunity to escape from usual routines, and they are very important in terms of motivation and challenges. Moreover, games provide encouragement to interact and communicate successfully for learners and permanence to carry on the effort of learning and create a context to use the language meaningfully; decreasing anxiety, and allowing learners the ability to study in a relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere. Games have many advantages for both language teachers and their learners. They support learning the target language when learners are involved in the games, have fun without noticing that they are learning the target language and additionally, it is a pleasure for the teacher when they present the language in an enjoyable way; making their teaching more effective in the process.

Games automatically stimulate student interest, and a properly introduced game can be one of the highest motivating techniques. Another advantage of using games in a foreign language setting is to diffuse stressful moments. In a language learning atmosphere, it is so important to create a stress-free environment. Therefore games are very advantageous since learners don’t usually feel any anxiety, their positive feelings increase and their self-confidence improves because they are not afraid of being punished or criticized while they are practicing the language freely in this manner.

The main advantages of using games in the classroom, are that they:

Learners may often feel that they are playing games completely for fun, so it is essential that teachers express that the game isn’t purely to kill time and play around. Teachers also need to be very careful about which games they choose to use, when to use them and how to connect them with the syllabus and, just as importantly, how beneficial they are. When choosing and adapting games in the English language classroom, teachers should be mindful of the following points:

There are though some negatives, which you will need to avoid when introducing a game into the classroom, and these are:

It is therefore necessary to take note of these four points above, in order to avoid demotivating students and having your game failing to live up to its aim/objective.

(9.2) Student engagement.

One of the first things you will notice as a new teacher, is that while one particular activity might work wonders with one particular group, you might find yourself scratching your head as to why a different group doesn’t respond to it likewise. Logically an activity or game that works like a charm for one group should work equally well with another. Right? Well, unfortunately the answer to this question is no.

Each individual student and every group class will respond to tasks differently and this can strongly be seen in group classes, where the group dynamics might be affected by interpersonal relationships within that group. Or, you simply might have one group which is more gregarious than another.

Student engagement is of course key in successfully delivering an EFL game or activity and one of the core ways of doing this is by explaining why the class is taking part in a particular activity or game, and how they will benefit from the learning experience.

As we saw when we covered Warmers and Coolers, dividing the class into competitive groups often increases class interest and by making divisions based on gender, you will avoid the potential awkwardness when one student says that they don’t want to be on a team with another particular student. By diving teams into boys vs. girls/men vs. women, the act of choosing team members for mixed teams, with the possibility of accidentally offending students if they are not on the team they want to be in, can be largely avoided.

If teachers hope for engaged students, and active learning and participation so that deep interaction of the material and meaningful learning can take place, then there is the requirement that teachers modify their techniques – depending on the class type and class dynamics – to increase student engagement with the material and participation as part of the learning process. Students who are engaged are involved and interested in course material and learning, are active members of the class and are more likely to participate; both in class and outside of it, which often leads to greater academic success.

Teachers tend to spend a lot of time in the planning and organization of the optimal use of the curriculum, materials, and with the facilitation of student interaction. Unfortunately, it is not always the case that teachers put enough thought into how to organize the class so that students can optimally interact with and learn from one another. Interaction patterns among students impacts their learning, their feelings toward the school, the teacher and other students, and confidence/self-esteem.

Competition encourages students to pit themselves against each other. However, simply seating students together in a room and telling them to work as a group does not mean they will collaborate; it needs to be taught. Students working in a collaborative setting work together to reach common goals/objectives that benefit all the members of the group. Learners become engaged in discussion and are required to clarify both their own and others’ ideas which can, in turn, lead to the development of critical thinking in the learning process.

For an activity or game to reach its full potential, to be healthy and be effective, the following set of conditions need to be present in the dynamic:

And finally, if students don’t see any enthusiasm from you regarding a given activity or game, they are likely to get heated about it themselves either. And if you have a student who refuses to interact with an activity or game, don’t force them to contribute. Instead, you could have them help you organize the game, or have them act as point scorer, etc.

(9.3) Games and activities.

In this last section of the ninth module, we are going to start by taking a look at one particular game which our graduates find pleases almost 100% of their students, and then we will be looking at some basic essentials to follow when choosing and introducing activities.

Crazy Cards.

For this game, all you need is a standard deck of playing cards, a whiteboard, 20-30 cut up small slips of blank paper (depending on how many students are in your group) and a cup.

Have your students sit around one table and place the cup in the center and spread the cards out, face down, in a circle around the cup – making sure to leave out the Jokers as these are not required for this game. On the whiteboard (or on a photocopied handout if a whiteboard isn’t available) list the twelve cards (Ace to King) and the actions associated with each card:

Before you start the game, hand every learner two small slips of paper. Instruct them to write down two questions and to keep them secret! When they are finished, they need to fold up their two pieces of paper and place them in the cup on the table. Depending on the type of students, you could prompt them write down general questions like, ‘What’s your favorite color?’ For more adult classes it can be fun to push the envelope a little and a student might write, for example, ‘Have you ever been fired from a job?’ It really depends on the age of your students and type of learners playing the game.

The students then take turns in picking a playing card. When it’s their turn, they choose one and hold it up so the whole class can see it, and they must perform the action associated with that card.

So for example, if a student picks a King, they take a piece of paper from the cup and can ask anyone the question written on it. If they pick a Queen, they ask a girl/woman, and so on. If a 9 is chosen, everyone has to push back their ears to resemble bunny ears and the last person to do this has to pick a question to answer. The same occurs when a student picks a 7 and the last person to touch their nose has to take a question from the cup and answer it. If a student picks an 8, you choose a topic and each student has to say a word linked to that topic. This continues round until a student can’t think of a word and when they inevitably need to choose a question to answer.

One of the reasons why we love this game is because it is so versatile. Instead of bunny ears, for example, you could have it as a rule that you need to say a phrase that you have been learning in class. For example, if your class has been looking at the topic of ‘cuisine’ then number 9 could be, ‘Say: “That was delicious!”.

The possibilities are really endless and we will leave it up to you to create your own version of this game, should you find yourself wanting to utilize it in your classes.

The basic building block of a lesson is the activity or task. We’ll define this fairly broadly as ‘something that learners do that involves them using or working with language to achieve some specific outcome’. The outcome may reflect a ‘real-world’ outcome (for example, learners role play buying train tickets at the station) or it may be a purely ‘for-the-purposes-of-learning’ outcome (for example, learners fill in the gaps in twelve sentences with present perfect verbs). By this definition, all of the following are activities or tasks:

Some things that happen in the classroom are not tasks. For example, picture a room where the teacher has started spontaneously discussing in a lengthy or convoluted manner the formation of passive sentences. What are students doing that has an outcome? Arguably, there is an implied task, namely that learners should ‘listen and understand’, but, by not being explicit, there is a real danger that learners are not genuinely engaged in anything much at all.

This is a basic, important and often overlooked consideration when planning a lesson. As far as possible, make sure that your learners have some specific thing to do, whatever the stage of the lesson. Traditional lesson planning has tended to see the lesson as a series of things that the teacher does. By turning it round and focusing much more on what the students do, we are likely to think more about the actual learning that might arise and create a lesson that is more genuinely useful. (And if you plan everything in terms of what the students will do, you might find you worry less about what the teacher has to do!) Even for stages when you are ‘presenting’ language, be clear to yourself what it is that students are supposed to be doing and what outcome it is leading to. Think of a complete lesson as being a coherent sequence of such learner-targeted tasks. 

Here is a basic route map plan for running a simple activity. In some bigger activities, there may be a number of clearly separate ‘sections’ within the task, in which case you would go through Steps 3, 4 and 5 a few times.

  1. Before the lesson: familiarize yourself with the material and activity; prepare any materials or texts you need. 
  2. In class: lead-in/prepare for the activity.
  3. Set up the activity – or section of activity – by giving instructions, forming groups, etc.
  4. Run the activity (or section): students do the activity, maybe in pairs or small groups while you monitor and help. 
  5. Close the activity (or section) and invite feedback from the learners.
  6. Post-activity: do any appropriate follow-on work.

Now, let’s look at each step in more detail:

Before the lesson.

Lead-in/Preparation.

This may be to help raise motivation or interest (for example, discussion of a picture related to the topic), or perhaps to focus on language items (for example, items of vocabulary) that might be useful in the activity. Typical lead-ins are:

Setting up the activity.

Running the activity.

Closing the activity.

Post-activity.

It is important to have some kind of feedback session on the activity. This stage is vital and is typically under-planned by teachers! The students have worked hard on the task, and it has probably raised a number of ideas, comments and questions about the topic and about language. Many teachers rely on an ‘ask the class if there were any problems and field the answers on the spot’ approach. While this will often get you through, it can also lead you down dark alleys of confusing explanations and long-winded spontaneous teaching. It can also be rather dull simply to go over things that have already been done thoroughly in small groups. So, for a number of reasons, it is worth careful planning of this stage in advance – especially to think up alternatives to putting yourself in the spotlight answering a long list of questions.

Congratulations on reading through the ninth module!

Now it’s time to take the Module 9 Quiz, after which you will gain access to the tenth module.

Important! We recommend reading through the ninth module again to ensure that you are fully prepared to take this quiz.

Click on the VIEW THE LESSON QUIZ button to proceed to the Module 9 Quiz…

Exit mobile version