In this post I’d like to outline an example of using games to encourage collaboration. The games can be found on the British Council site ‘Voices’ and you can follow the link by clicking here. Below I’ve written a bit about the background but it’s not necessary if you’re just looking for instructions for the activities.

I was teaching a class of 12 pre-intermediate teenagers and I’d identified a couple of ongoing problems after the first few lessons. The students were sometimes reluctant to work together, especially in pairs. Also, more often than I’d like, individual students were repeating the same mistakes from lesson to lesson

I thought that there was a connection since students were making mistakes in isolation and weren’t learning from each other. My plan was to encourage them to collaborate by adapting relatively standard classroom activities into games involving teamwork.

I made three activities to practise the language structure “to be able to”: A group quiz based on a simple writing activity for the production stage in a grammar lesson and two team games, one for error correction and the other based on gap fills for revision.

The students enjoyed all three activities and they seemed to have a positive impact on both the atmosphere in the class and the students’ willingness to work together.

When I was invited to write for British Council’s ‘Voices’ this seemed like an ideal topic. For further details and instructions for the games follow the link by clicking here.

For more games revising grammar, you can follow these links:

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