The Learning Power of a Game

It’s 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, and 8th grade English language learners are jumping out of their seats, squealing, laughing, and smiling (well, their eyes are smiling—I assume their mouths are, too, underneath their masks…Oh, Covid…). And it’s all about the past participles of irregular verbs. Yes, really. 

We are playing a game. You roll the dice, and you get to take the move if you can give the correct past participle form of the verb printed in the square you land on. We’re studying modals to express degrees of certainty, so you simply fill in the blank: “might have ___.” For take it’s taken, for go it’s gone, for sell it’s sold. You get the idea. 

I found the game board on iSLCollective when I was collecting games this summer. The name on the board says “Ludo,” a game I’d never heard of, but Googling the rules, I discovered it looks a lot like what I know as Sorry. I had discovered in my first trimester as an EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher, April to July, that even my advanced students still struggle with irregular verbs, and I determined to come back and hit that hard in the fall trimester. I had simultaneously discovered the energy that games bring to the language learning classroom, and determined to use some of my summer break to research games to use. (See this blog post for all the games I discovered.) So when I saw this Ludo game with irregular verbs, I knew it would be good. I just had no idea HOW good. 

How good is it?

• Friday afternoons no longer drag. We played this for the last 15-20 minutes of a 45-minute period for the first time last week Friday. This Friday students dragged into class, asked if we were going to play a game, and immediately perked up when I answered affirmatively—even though we were working on other things for the first 25 minutes.
• Students practice. Eagerly. With social support—friends (and opponents) sitting on the edge of their seats willing them to get (or miss) the correct verb form. Communal laughter when a missed verb is re-landed on and gotten this time…or missed…again. 
• Students strategize to practice. They don’t know they’re doing. They think they are sort of “cheating” when they realize that if they get all their pieces out and move in a block around the board, they are likely to hit the same verb in quick succession, making it “easy” to get it right. (Ha! They’ve just practiced 4 times in a row, and every time someone else lands on it, or they get sent home and have to re-cover the same ground again, they are interleaving practice!)
• We hit the sweet spot of what brain science tells us is effective learning, with the fun and rewards triggers releasing the chemicals oxytocin and dopamine that dial up the memory circuits of the brain.

What are they really learning?
I’ve given students a list of the 50 most frequently used irregular verbs. We highlighted the ones that are on this game board, so they can prepare ahead if they want. I’ve told them there will at some point be a test over all the verbs, so this isn’t all fun and games. It dampened their spirits for approximately 5 seconds. I probably should have given a pretest to really test the effectiveness…and maybe I still will! I’ll report back in a few weeks on what they really learned. When they’ve got this set, I’ll have to design my own game board to cover the rest of the irregular verbs. (By the way, I have noticed that there are a few regular verbs scattered among the irregular ones. I think that’s a great idea to keep the kids from assuming that the forms CANT be regular!)

What about Covid?
I am lucky enough to be face-to-face with my students. Still, I have a pair of dice for each student, I post or project the game board on the whiteboard, and I use colored magnets for the game pieces. They can roll individually, and then direct me how to move their pieces, so we aren’t all breathing all over each other and touching the same pieces. The dice I clean after each class.

I’m also lucky enough to have only the perfect number of 4 students in this class. What if I had more? I might do teams with a rotating speaker with a limited number of asks for help available. Or I have several games going. In that case, I’d have to have a 5th student in each group to be the judge, and, in Covid, he or she could also be the mover of game pieces.

If I were virtual, I don’t think it would be too hard to make a game board digitally. My first thought, since we’re using Google, is the JamBoard app. 

Can I finish a game in 15-20 minutes? 
No. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Last week I took a picture so we could pick up where we left off. But we ended up starting over because I decided to tweak some rules. It didn’t diminish the excitement one bit. I took another picture at the end of class this time. I use it to start the game next Friday.

What were the rule tweaks?
Here’s a link to some rules I found. I’ve decided to not require any particular number to get onto the board—we just want to get practicing! We didn’t use the blocking or sending home rules the first time. The second time I added them in. The sending home rule really upped the excitement. The blockading rule no one has used yet. The second time I also went from one to two dice—or we’ll never finish! I decided we always use the smallest number first, and if you fail to get that answer, you don’t get the second number. However, if using the smaller one first allows you to land on another player and send it home, you can use it first. 

Have you discovered any games that energize your language learning students and support their learning? I’d love to hear about them!