4 Resources for EFL/ESL Games

“Yaruki, ne!” Eighth graders walked out of my classroom grinning and talking animatedly one day back in the beginning of July. What had we done? Just played a review game. Before exams. It’s too bad it took a whole trimester for me to remember the significance of games in motivation for language learning. I’ve spent 30 years as an English language arts (ELA) teacher using purpose to motivate. Having recently branched into teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), I realized that’s easier with reading, writing, and discussing on literary themes like the tension between individuality and community than with practicing the past perfect tense. I quietly promised myself that during the summer I’d research some games to use for the fall term, games that I could use as an energizing 5-minute class opener, a fun end-of-class review, or sometimes a longer opportunity for prompting conversation. 

What do games accomplish? As well as making drill less onerous and motivating engagement with material, having fun actually increases memory retention. As I searched games related to my standards for the next term, there were 4 sites that frequently came up. One of them is completely free, and the other 3 have a certain amount of free materials that they hope I will find so useful I will pay the subscription fee to access the rest. So I’m going to spend the next term experimenting with the free stuff, and then decide if one of the sites is worth the membership fee. Here are the 4 sites, and some of the content I looked at: 

(1) iSLCollective: This is the totally free site, and there is a TON of stuff here—games, worksheets, videos, and more—though the quality is uneven (grammar errors in English materials is counterproductive unless one is teaching irony). Here are some of the games I’ve marked to use:

• A board game to practice using the conditional, “What would you do if…?” There are 32 prompts on the way to the end, from fun ones like “You find a time machine” to more realistic ones like “You get a bad grade.”
• Another board game (they call it Ludo, but it looks like Sorry to me) for reviewing irregular verbs. You have to give the past or past perfect form of the irregular verb you land on.
• Speaking cards on giving advice. This would practice using modals (should, could) as well as the personality vocabulary. There are 12 cards, each with a prompt like “Your friend is very shy. Give him some advice to be more confident.”

(2) TEFL Handbook: This site has full lesson plans, many of which include games, and they are all designed to require few resources, which is a preparation plus! There are currently 2 levels each of beginning, elementary, intermediate, with advanced materials to be added. I looked at a lesson on prepositions of time. It includes a lead-in activity, a couple of class activities, and a game. The game is a sort of prepositions charades. You assign each student a time expression (10 examples are given). Students write a sentence using it on one side of a blank piece of paper and illustrate the sentence on the other. Teams guess.

(3) Teach This: If these games turn out to be as good as they look, access to all content may be worth the membership fee of $40/year! One game that I want to try is a board game on articles (a, an, the). There are 32 squares, 16 labelled true/false and 16 labelled “talk about.” For example, one of the true/false squares says, “I have never been to ___ Philippines.” The player who lands there gets a point for supplying the correct article, and then the other players guess whether that statement is true or false for that player. Any who get it right also get a point. One of the “talk about” squares says, “___ most expensive thing you’ve ever bought.” Again, the player who lands here gets a point for supplying the correct article, and then a chance for an extra point if she can talk about the topic for 30 seconds. (To see the game, scroll down to 3rd download on this link.) 

(4) EFL Sensei: I actually bought a book of 10 board games for $9.99 right at the beginning of the summer, before doing all this other research, figuring if I never got around to anything else, spending the money would at least provide me with a fun activity for, say, most Fridays of the fall term. And looking at the games, they are really well done. Similar to some of the ones on iSLCollective (like “What would you do if…?”), but a little more complex, with complete directions, and always grammatically correct. For example, in

“If…” the student to the left of the one moving asks the question stem “What will you do if...” plus one of the 17 landing spot prompts, such as “It’s nice this weekend” or “I win one million dollars.”  In addition to the prompt spots, this one has the added complexity of spots to go back 2, go forward 3, take a shortcut, and trade places with another player. 

So here’s to a little more fun in EFL class this term! Fun that will also more deeply embed what we study and spark more oral practice. I’m excited to try some of these games out. Do you have any favorite games to play with EFL students?