ESL is the teaching of English as a second language, and, as with the teaching of any language, you must start out slowly to allow students to remember and understand the meanings of words so that they can learn how to use them in sentences and everyday English speaking. There is an abundance of ESL memory games available for these purposes.

Vocabulary Pairing Game
This game from the English4Kids website is played by pairing together 10 place nouns and 10 related activities. Examples include hospital = see a doctor; park = go for a walk; restaurant = have meals; and pharmacy = buy medicine. The teacher creates a grid made up of 20 boxes and fills each box with a noun or phrase. The students copy the grid, read the words and write the matching word or phrase into each box. This allows students to make a connection between different nouns and verbs while committing the words to memory.

Audio Concentration
Students play the Audio Concentration game by listening to a short audio clip of easily spoken words in a sequence of 10 to 12 words, and then stopping the audio. The students then repeat the words back to you in order. This helps the students remember the words that they are saying and trains their memory with different vocabulary. The students must rely on their ears only; there are no pictures to help them remember the words.

Food And Something To Eat Memory Game
This game is available a the ESL Games World website. This game teaches students to remember words that go together. To play the game, click on "Start" and the game will load a castle wall with different sections with a monster on top of the wall with a flag. The game is tallied in points and attempts and is signified by the monster waving a flag upon each pass or fail. The top sections of the wall are clicked to reveal a food item and the corresponding word is below in the bottom portion of the wall and must be clicked to make a pair. This helps teach students to remember different words by pairing them to their corresponding picture.

Read And Match
The English Media Lab website offers the Read and Match game, a memory game that you play by clicking on a square to see the hidden words beneath and then clicking on another square to find a match. The game reveals the hidden words quickly, so it forces students to remember the words that they are seeing. The timer keeps track of the progress, and the game is over when the student has matched all of the words correctly.