The Learning Power of a Game (pt. 2)

Eighth grade English as a foreign language (EFL) students walked out of class on a Friday afternoon repeating passive-voice sentences and giggling: 

• Mirrors were NOT invented by nine million people every day.
• 70% of the earth is NOT covered by the Egyptians.
• Almost a quarter of the land area of Los Angeles is NOT taken up by a 14-year-old Roman emperor.

In my debut year of teaching EFL, I’ve learned and relearned that games can be hugely motivating. As energy and engagement rise, so does learning. The problem is not all language games are created equal—in how engaging the students find them, or in the value of the learning that happens relative to the time invested. I wasn’t sure how this one would rate in either category, but we needed a game and we needed to introduce passive voice verbs. So I found this game on the TeachThis web site. (Unfortunately, it isn’t one of their free ones, but I found their free offerings enticing enough to plunk down for an annual membership, and it has been utterly worth it. I am not being paid to say this!)

Here’s how this game goes: There’s a table of passive voice sentences with most of the sentence (through the verb) on the left and an in or by phrase on the right. I printed it, cut everything apart, and scrambled everything. The first step is to look at the grammar. We classified the pieces as front half or back half and asked, “What do you notice?” (Front half: Starts with a capital letter, ends with a verb. Back half: Ends with a period, starts with in or by.) 

Next, we had to match the sentence halves all up—introducing the facts, using logic, and learning vocabulary. (Got some global competence here, too! When I asked students at the end of class what they’d learned they offered “Pasta and ice cream were first made in China” and “742 languages are spoken in Indonesia.”) Though some of the facts students already knew. (“The Tokyo subway is used—by nine million people every day.”) 

Some of the matching we could do by logic. One of the first tries was “70% of the earth is covered—by rainforest.” After I told the group they were on the right track with sentence structure, but they needed to actually visualize the sentence meaning, they realized it was “70% of the earth is covered—by water” and “14% of the Earth’s surface is covered—by rainforest.” 

But logic presupposes comprehension, so I overheard a whispered discussion in Japanese clarifying the meaning of “oil” in “Each day over 10 million barrels of oil are produced—in Saudi Arabia.”  Not “cooking oil” but what gasoline and kerosene come from. A game boosts language students’ intrinsic motivation for understanding vocabulary. 

There were also a lot of sentences I had to just give away, because none of us had any idea. (“The pencil was invented—by Conrad Gessner in Switzerland.”) But that's okay because by that time, students' curiosity was piqued and they really wanted to know! 

Then came the memory game. We turned the strips upside down in 2 columns—front half and back half—and took turns trying to turn over matching pairs. Here’s the grammar kicker—you always have to read the sentence you turn over, and if it isn’t correct, you have to make it negative, like this: “Toothpaste was NOT invented—by water.” Yes, it could get pretty nonsensical, but it elicited giggles, and humor positively correlates with learning! (One of the true sentences targeted this directly: “The Whoopee cushion was invented—by a 14-year-old Roman Emperor.”)

I had said we’d play the memory game for 10 minutes, not knowing how well it would go over. When the timer went off, students asked if we could keep playing. Why not? The next thing in my lesson plan was a worksheet on passive voice, but the learning was already happening. 

By the end of the class, in addition to an assortment of interesting global facts and the pattern of passive voice verbs, we’d also learned that one of the class members has an amazing spacial memory. She ended with 3 times as many pairs as the next person!

So, what makes a language learning game good? I still don’t know 100%, but I know that these factors contributed to yesterday’s success of the passive voice matching memory game:

• The intrinsic motivation of competition

• Strong patterning

• A good dash of humor 

Anything that results with students walking out of a Friday afternoon language class giggling and repeating the studied grammar pattern is worth figuring out how to repeat, so I want to keep experimenting!

What kinds of games have worked well for you, where do you find them, and why do you think they work?