GAMES AND BENEFITS OF RECEPTIVE GRAMMAR PRACTICE ACTIVITIES
Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 11:07 am1.- Games to make practice activities more interesting and motivating for students. (UNIT 4)
There are many games that we can practise with our students to provide them with interesting and motivating practice activities that, otherwise, could be a bit boring. I normally try to include one game per lesson at the end of it so that all the new vocabulary and grammar points that have appeared during the lesson can be practised.
One of my favourite ones is “The Coffeepot”. I think it is a perfect game to revise verbal tenses and short answers. I started practising this game many years ago because I realised that some students – particularly teenagers – had problems to internalise the internal structure of questions once they were in contact with different verbal tenses such as present simple, present continuous, present perfect, past simple, etc.
An example of how the game is played. A student thinks of a verb, for example, “sleep”. This verb is his/her “coffeepot”. After the student has made his/her choice, it is time to guess that coffeepot. In order to do this, students have to ask questions putting the word “coffeepot” instead of the verb that has been chosen. It works really well and students enjoy a lot playing this game because it has an element of “guessing” that makes it attractive and, at the same time, sometimes the questions are really funny so that we all end up laughing a lot.
4.- Benefits of providing learners with receptive grammar practice activities. (UNIT 4)
I firmly believe that it is very important to provide learners with receptive grammar practice activities as the first step towards producing appropriate sentences including the grammar item that we have introduced.
I also think that doing this has many benefits, especially for adult learners. In general, I consider that adults usually feel insecure to speak if they do not consider that they have mastered the new grammar item. Thus, the fact that we let our students internalise the new structure by providing a certain amount of “receptive grammar practice activities” makes them feel more secure and ready to go one step further and “produce” language, which is – after all – our main concern as teachers.
However, it is very difficult to establish an appropriate balance between the amount of receptive and productive activities in our classes. As a general rule, I prefer to start doing more receptive than productive activities during the first term and, later on, I work towards a fifty-fifty percentage during the second term. Ideally, in the last term the percentage changes in favour of the productive activities. But, needless to say, every group of students is a different world and I need to adapt my plans depending on the group.
There are many games that we can practise with our students to provide them with interesting and motivating practice activities that, otherwise, could be a bit boring. I normally try to include one game per lesson at the end of it so that all the new vocabulary and grammar points that have appeared during the lesson can be practised.
One of my favourite ones is “The Coffeepot”. I think it is a perfect game to revise verbal tenses and short answers. I started practising this game many years ago because I realised that some students – particularly teenagers – had problems to internalise the internal structure of questions once they were in contact with different verbal tenses such as present simple, present continuous, present perfect, past simple, etc.
An example of how the game is played. A student thinks of a verb, for example, “sleep”. This verb is his/her “coffeepot”. After the student has made his/her choice, it is time to guess that coffeepot. In order to do this, students have to ask questions putting the word “coffeepot” instead of the verb that has been chosen. It works really well and students enjoy a lot playing this game because it has an element of “guessing” that makes it attractive and, at the same time, sometimes the questions are really funny so that we all end up laughing a lot.
4.- Benefits of providing learners with receptive grammar practice activities. (UNIT 4)
I firmly believe that it is very important to provide learners with receptive grammar practice activities as the first step towards producing appropriate sentences including the grammar item that we have introduced.
I also think that doing this has many benefits, especially for adult learners. In general, I consider that adults usually feel insecure to speak if they do not consider that they have mastered the new grammar item. Thus, the fact that we let our students internalise the new structure by providing a certain amount of “receptive grammar practice activities” makes them feel more secure and ready to go one step further and “produce” language, which is – after all – our main concern as teachers.
However, it is very difficult to establish an appropriate balance between the amount of receptive and productive activities in our classes. As a general rule, I prefer to start doing more receptive than productive activities during the first term and, later on, I work towards a fifty-fifty percentage during the second term. Ideally, in the last term the percentage changes in favour of the productive activities. But, needless to say, every group of students is a different world and I need to adapt my plans depending on the group.