Skip to main content

Game shows you could use in language lessons



I started a thread on the GILT Facebook group the other day. GILT = Global Innovative Language Teachers, in case you don't know of it. My topic was TV and radio game shows you can adapt for productive language lessons. Here are the ideas teachers came up with. I'll begin with the ones I used to use on occasion:

  • The Price is Right (guessing prices of items to practise numbers and descriptive language).
  • Countdown (in French Le jeu des chiffres et des lettres) for practising numbers).
  • Just a Minute (the BBC radio show where you have to talk for a minute without repetition, hesitation or deviation) - good for fluency practice and oral exam revision.
  • University Challenge (UK TV show - general knowledge team quiz for advanced students - good for listening, speaking and general cultural knowledge).
  • Would I Lie to You? (BBC TV panel show - advanced level, guessing if someone’s story is true or false - listening and fluency).
  • Call my Bluff (old BBC panel show) - for advanced level, students give definitions of rare words, either true or false. This takes preparation, either by you or students, in terms of making up the false definitions as well as finding good words and the correct definition).


Other teachers suggested the following:

Aine O'Gorman wrote: "I like to do Pointless - you can do a think pair share where students come up with vocab on a topic, but when they do their share, it has to be something no other group has thought of. If no one else is thought of it, it’s a pointless answer & it’s the winner."
Gary Samuel: "My favourite quiz show was Going for Gold - something like the final "who/what am I ćround with the 4-3-2-1 countdown springs to mind. Bit more difficult sourcing contestants from other European countries though!"
Lou Smith: "I used to use blockbusters - I had a version for phonic sounds where they stepped on a card on the floor which corresponded to the right ‘ sound’ in the word I said. (Thanks to the former Warwickshire LA adviser, about 10 yrs ago!)"
Aurelie: "I had (then lost) a PowerPoint template of Who wants to be a millionaire... all I had to do was input questions/answers then put the "right answer" highlighted feature over the actual right answer for the next slide and some sound effect. It was really looking like the real thing, same font, etc."
Geraldine Aria added: "You can also make it online, I use this website: https://www.superteachertools.us/millionaire/ This is my attempt with it https://www.superteachertools.us/milli.../millionaire.php... (my ER verb recap)"
Also from Aurelie: "Family Fortunes - "Une famille en or" in French - you can set up pretend "families" in class (that should be a bit of a laugh to start with) and write up some questions with variously graded answers, either based on cultural facts, or if vocab/grammar based then at the discretion of the teacher..."
Daniele Bourdais added: "This is an idea for French, adapted from an old TV game, le Schmilblick (mentioned in my book "Games for teaching Primary French" as a speaking & listening game):



Alison Welsh suggested: "Wipeout , where you lose all your points if you get a wrong answer. Not to be confused with Total Wipeout!"

Cyndi Sauvage (?): "The Dating Game is good for practising Si clauses in French. You need some sort of partition or screen to “hide” the bachelors/bachelorettes." (I like that last word!)

Adeline Braud: "Jeopardy! (or Quia Challenge Boards)
https://jeopardylabs.com/

Ralf Meijer: "Who dares wins? Categories and teams bid to say how many they think they can name in a category, they bid each other up until they say 'name them'".

Joanne Sewell: "I've used Tenable for New technologies ( top 10 apps used in France, top 10 devices, top 10 websites, Top 10 social medias etc.) using data from 2019 surveys."

Language teachers are an inventive bunch!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).
Post a Comment
Read more

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
4 comments
Read more

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics
5 comments
Read more