Maybe you like to get students to play battleships to practise verb conjugations. It's a simple and enjoyable information gap game which gets students communicating in a structured fashion. Students get to say verb forms repeatedly and improve their language skills as a result. However, you could criticise the game for focusing almost entirely on form at the expense of meaning, so why not try this variation which will get students to produce longer utterances and be creative, with a greater focus on meaning.
Suppose you are working on the perfect tense with a grid made up of pronouns down the left and infinitives along the top. Normally you would get students to play the game by giving just pronoun and verb e.g. tu as dansé. Instead of this require students to add an extra element to the verb, so a students might say tu as dansé avec ton ami. At some point during the game you can then require students to make up sentences with a verb + two elements e.g. tu as dansé dans ta chambre avec ton ami. Some time later you can then tell students to add another element to their sentences.
The challenge of adding extra elements provides a natural progression to the lesson and some fun for students as their creativity is challenged.
If you wanted to take it further you could get them to do negatives for a few moments.
Incidentally, battleships can also work well with vocabulary. With near beginners, for example, they could use their grid to design a simple town with, say, one square for a shop, two for a railway station, two for a swimming pool, three for a shopping centre etc. To make this game more challenging you could require pupils to add a verb to the place, thus practising aller with au/à la/aux e.g. je vais à la gare. In pairs it would work like this: Tu vas à la piscine? Non, je ne vais pas à la piscine. Tu vas au stade? Oui, je vais au stade.
I have quite a few ready-made Battleships grids on frenchteacher.net.
Suppose you are working on the perfect tense with a grid made up of pronouns down the left and infinitives along the top. Normally you would get students to play the game by giving just pronoun and verb e.g. tu as dansé. Instead of this require students to add an extra element to the verb, so a students might say tu as dansé avec ton ami. At some point during the game you can then require students to make up sentences with a verb + two elements e.g. tu as dansé dans ta chambre avec ton ami. Some time later you can then tell students to add another element to their sentences.
The challenge of adding extra elements provides a natural progression to the lesson and some fun for students as their creativity is challenged.
If you wanted to take it further you could get them to do negatives for a few moments.
Incidentally, battleships can also work well with vocabulary. With near beginners, for example, they could use their grid to design a simple town with, say, one square for a shop, two for a railway station, two for a swimming pool, three for a shopping centre etc. To make this game more challenging you could require pupils to add a verb to the place, thus practising aller with au/à la/aux e.g. je vais à la gare. In pairs it would work like this: Tu vas à la piscine? Non, je ne vais pas à la piscine. Tu vas au stade? Oui, je vais au stade.
I have quite a few ready-made Battleships grids on frenchteacher.net.
Comments
Post a Comment