Call my bluff

Lesson

	level	Skill	Age	Time
	Pre Int+	Speaking: Call my bluff	Adults / YL	90+

The lesson includes an example of a fun guessing game to give students extended speaking practice.

Click on the links above to get straight to the lesson, what follows is my thought process in putting the lesson together

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Why I designed this class

Using Games in the English Classroom

This game was a bit of a life saver and the end of last term because it’s basically a couple hours of class with little or no prep. It meant that I had enough time to prepare students’ certificates without worrying about prepping the class. It prompted me to have a bit of a read around the theory of using games in the classroom. The prevailing opinion seems to be:

Language learning is hard work .. Effort is required at every moment and must be maintained over a long period of time. Games help and encourage many learners to sustain their interest and work. ^[1]

As a not particularly successful language learner, the hard work part is something that I can relate to. Beyond sustaining students’ interest there are a variety of reasons given in the literature for why we should use games including that they lower students anxiety, promote learner interaction, encourage quieter students to participate, create meaningful contexts and promote the use of more than one skill.

What interested me more though were the characteristics of good communicative language games. Communicative language games are one in which students need to use language in meaningful way to solve some sort of problem. Information gap activities like the eponymous halfacrosswords are one of the most common examples. Not all games need to be communicative. A game such as pelmanism encourages learners to think about new vocabulary and hopefully commit it to memory. But I think the most enjoyable games are ones where learners are focusing on the task rather than the language.

Games, according to Rodgers (1981) ^[2], are competitive, rule-governed, goal-defined, have closure, and are engaging. I think this set of criteria are pretty useful when designing a communicative language game. Ensuring a game has closure could be as simple as setting a time limit on the activity. That way there is a predetermined point at which the game is over whether the players have met the goals of the game or not.

How much flexibility there is on each of these points may vary from teacher to teacher. Some games rely upon students keeping score but oftentimes students don’t bother with this and seem to enjoy the game just as much. Even the specificity of rules can be up for debate. At times I’ve given instructions so poorly that students have improvised their own game often with better results.

Whether games should be co-operative or competitive is also a point of debate. It’s easy to see how both aspects of game play could add to learners’ enjoyment. A simple solution is to get learners to play in small teams rather than individually. As Rinvoluci and Davis state:

competitive activities that hit pairs against pairs and threes against threes are excellent for fostering collaboration and mutual help within each team. ^[3]

Finally another characteristic that is sometimes mentioned in relation to games is that they are non-productive. I take this to mean that they do not result in any lasting artifact such as a piece of writing. While it’s true that most games have an ephemeral nature and are easily passed over for the next activity, I feel that games can still have a creative element. For example, Call My Bluff requires students to write false definitions. I think this creative process means that students are more engaged in the latter stage of the game when they try and convince other learners that those definition are true.

Further reading

	Author	Title
	Adam Simpson	Using Games in the Language Classroom