ESL Games for adults

Who said games where just for kids. This past week we have been learning how to implement game based lessons in our classrooms. Game-based learning is basically using games (new or already invented ones) to foster learning and engage our students.

We have talked about many games and I thought, why not using games for adults too? So here you have some games I have thought about that we can use in our ESL lessons.

TABOO

For those who don't know yet what it is about, Taboo is an awesome game that can be used for several topics. In my case, I have thought about using it for vocabulary learning. In groups or in pairs, someone has to describe a word without saying it and the rest must guess which word it is.

I have also played with mime. Someone has to describe the word or sentence by doing gestures and it is so funny! If you want to make it even more difficult you can do it with sounds, for example, for animal vocabulary. With this option, animal sounds in different languages can be studied too.

STOP!

A really nice game that I've used no matter the age of my students is Scattegories. It is so useful for lower levels, although it can be used with higher ones if we set more difficult categories. Plus, it is super easy as you just need a piece of paper and a pen.

The teacher must settle some categories (animal, color, city, country and food, for example) and say a letter. Students have to write one word for each category with that letter. The first to finish will say STOP! and everyone must stop writing. When comparing the categories, the student who has a word that none has wirtten will get 10 points. If their word is shared by others, they will get 5 points and if they didn't come up with a word, they'll get 0 points. The winner will choose the next letter.

CODENAMES

Codenames is a game which can be also used to practice different skills of the ESL class. While learning vocabulary, our students will be playing in a gameboard of a specific topic, maybe food or clothes, and we can practice other skills too, as writing and oral. We can make them learn about different culture food and drinks or have them write a recipe after the game. I have written a lesson plan in which I write a bit more about Codenames in the ESL classroom, you can check it out in my 'Tasks' page ;)