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1. There are several games I use to practise language items. The ‘alibi game’ is one my students really enjoy when we practise the past tense. With the whole group I briefly tell them a murder story where the Lady of a mansion has been found murdered. There are two suspects, the maid and the gardener/ butler..( you can invent the characters) but they have an alibi. You give the whole class this info: from 4pm to 1am they were in London together. They say they went to the cinema, for dinner and then clubbing. The police is going to question them SEPARATELY to see if their answers are the same. The teacher chooses then two volunteers in the group ( if possible, they should be good at English) to be the suspects. They leave the classroom and prepare their alibi in as much detail as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of the class will act as the investigators and together they start preparing detailed questions ( e.g what film did you watch? did you eat anything? what were you wearing that night? etc..) about their alibi. Then while one of the suspects stays outside the classroom, the class interrogates the first suspect and note down his/her answers. Then the second comes in and answers the same questions. If they have more than three different answers, the police/class has managed to prove they are the culprits.
My students love this game. It’s really fun and they write lots of questions using the target language without even realising.
Another game I use is the ‘chained conditional story’. On the board I start with a sentence like ‘ If I won a trip to the States, ....’ and ask someone in class to finish the sentence. Then another student picks up this sentence and continues, adapting the structure ( ‘ if I won a trip to the States, I would go to San Francisco... If I went to San Francisco, I would..) and we continue the story for a while until I pick a student to end the story. You can use it with the third conditional form ( it is harder for them to build the sentences orally but it’s good practice) or other language items.It’s a quick exercise, good for the last minutes of the class.
A good revision of the grammar items practised in class can be done with the ‘bet game’, where I mix right and wrong sentences using the language items worked on in class. The students work in pairs and they are given a set of points to bet on every sentence I write on the board. If they get it correct, they add up the points they bet, if they don’t, they lose the points they have bet.

2. Some of the practice activities done in class are more motivating if you turn them into a competition, working in pairs or small groups. Adapting the activity, by personalizing it, can also get the students more motivated. Recreating short dialogues using the target language is useful for the teacher to see if they understand the grammar item and fun for them because they enjoy ‘performing’ these short dialogues.