The difference between an activity that works and one that doesn’t often boils down to two things- how much the teacher believes in the activity and how well he or she sets it up. And the secret to setting up activities well is thinking about setting-up as a series of stages. You don’t always have to do all the stages, but you might as well just as long as the students are being exposed to useful language, be it by taking part in the game as a class or listening to the language you use to give instructions. The full stages are:

1- Demonstrate the game as a class

2- Elicit the ‘incidental language’ the students will need to play the game

3- Elicit/ explain the rules and write them up on the board

4- Split the class into groups/ teams

5- Use instruction checking questions

6- Have one group start playing with everyone else watching

7- Let all the other groups start playing

8- Go straight to any group that looks confused or is usually slow to catch on and get them started

9- Whip quickly around the class making sure that everyone is playing the game more or less correctly. If everyone is doing the game seriously wrong or many teams have the same question about the rules, stop the whole class and explain again.

10- Go around the class again, monitoring for the language used and errors of pronunciation and grammar

If possible, demonstrate the activity before explaining it- for instance, by starting a team game with you against the whole class. When explaining the game ‘20 Questions’, you can brainstorm a list of objects/ jobs etc. onto the board then ask the whole class to choose one while you are out of the room. Ask yes/ no questions to guess which they have chosen, getting the whole class to agree on each answer. Do the same again, making one of the students choose one of the options and playing the game with you and the other students asking the questions.

Next elicit ‘incidental language’ (such as ‘dice’ and ‘it’s your turn’ for a board game); to make sure they will be able to use English as much as possible during the activity. Write a summary of the rules up, again eliciting as much as you can, e.g. for 20 questions ask ‘How many questions can you ask?’, ‘Can you ask “what is your job?”’, ‘What kind of questions can you ask?’ These or similar questions can also be used to check if everyone/ individual students who were messing about followed the instructions (i.e. as instruction checking questions).

A variation on the staging of instructions that works well with EFL activities that are based on games outside the classroom (e.g. Blockbusters, What’s the time Mr Wolf) is to demonstrate the non-EFL version first. For example, with variations on Battleships (e.g. the one in the book ‘Pronunciation Games’) it is worth starting up a normal game of battleships and asking any students that know the rules to explain them to the rest of the class. You then continue with ‘Well, we’re going to play this game, but you’re going to learn English at the same time…’

With young learners, the system is basically the same but you have to bear in mind a few points:

1. Make sure you involve all the students at all times. For example, start the scoring for team games earlier by giving points during the elicitation of vocabulary and the rules of the game, and if you decide to demonstrate a board game by getting one group to do it first make sure all the other groups are involved by asking them to prompt the players with incidental language etc.

2. If the students misunderstand the rules but come up with a variation which is pretty much as good as the correct version in terms of language used, let them do it their way.

3. It’s a bit of a waste of time to using disciplinary techniques when you are giving the instructions for activities, as just making sure the students are quiet hardly makes sure they are listening to you and understand. It is better to use the techniques above such as giving them points when they show they understand what is going on or to have the game set up so that if they don’t listen they will lose the game when they finally start playing.

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Copyright Alexander Case