349. This one looks he's having fun



This is a post with which I responded to a teacher of English. The posts, both his and mine appear in www.pearsonlongman.com. The thread of posts are about dictionary games. This was my contribution. Picture from www friendlyplanet com


Hello Daniel,

I can also suggest some games I implement and they work so fine in my classes, and my students love those games!

1. (I hope to be any helpful: I see you implement similar stuff). Dictionary competition. I write a word on the whiteboard, and the students have to find the word as soon as possible in the dictionaries. The winner is the first in finding the word. Currently my students are aged 10 to 14.

2. Sometimes I am one of the players in the latter game. They wish to play vs their teacher. It’s funny.

3. One student counts the seconds one other student takes to find a given word in the dic. Obviously the winner is the fastest.

4. On worksheets or on the WB I write words that appear close to one another in the dictionary. The ss have to put them in the order which they appear in the dic. The point with these games is to make the ss become faster at finding words - and realize how useful the dic is, as a "private teacher" for the process of learning L2.

5. I elicit words of a semantic field and write them on the WB. They have then to memorize them in, say, one minute. Then one student ups and turns around, and has to give as many words as he can remember. His classmates have their eyes wide open so as to see which words he is saying... and which ones he didn't say. Quite fun. Or one student erases one word on the WB whilst the player is facing the opposite wall. Then this latter one turns around and tries to say the missing word. In this way they learn many words, also because we repeat these games.

6. I elicit letters. They or all of us have to make words with those letters. They can repeat the same letters. It's amazing to see the number of words that shows up on the WB, believe me.

7. I or someone else writes one letter. The rest of my students have to make words beginning with that letter, while I write them on the WB.

8. Same but the words they will say have that letter inside: the words don't begin with that letter.

I hope I can help you out somewhat. I have a list with more than 100 games, many of them regarding dic and vocab. Quite often they ask me to bring the dictionaries form the library to the classroom, to use them for their homework or worksheets I compose myself for them. More stuff on my blog on TEFL:

http://fernandoexperiences.blogspot.com

Currently I teach kids aged 10 to 14. Something I keep always in mind is that the ss have to increase their vocab: no words, no communication.

Best wishes

Fernando Diez Gallego

Granada (Spain)

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