Guessing games: keeping it simple and productive

A recurring theme on this blog and in the books I have written or co-written is that to keep workload and stress in check, it's great to have a repertoire of activities that need little or no preparation, but which are productive. By productive, I mean generate plenty of structured input, output and repetition. Some use the term "surrender value" or "opportunity cost" to get the idea of "bang for your buck" when planning a task. 

Some tasks can be relatively mechanical (drills), some more genuinely communicative (problem-solving communicative tasks), while some fall a bit in the middle (structured information-gap activities). One scholar in the field, Bill VanPatten, has labelled this last type "activities" (as opposed to "exercises" or "tasks").

Guessing games fall into that middle category. There is a gap in information between two or more students, but the activity doesn't lead to a purposeful problem-solving or real-life goal. I have blogged about guessing games before here. The first game in that list is "Week-end dernier". In a simple form, students work in pairs. Each partner secretly notes down in the target language five things they did last weekend. They then take turns asking yes/no questions to find out what their friend did, The first to get all five is the winner. With some classes, that's all you need to do since they will have lots of language they can call on from their memory. With other classes, you could easily scaffold the task by displaying a set of possible sentences or even a sentence builder with lost of options. In either case, the activity can be a great oral warm-up to start a lesson.

Before the activity is started, it will usually be worthwhile modelling the activity first, so that students get to hear examples of questions in the second person singular, e.g. in French Tu as fait une promenade? Tu as joué au foot? You may want to insist that, when answering, students give full sentences. This is artificial, but does force students into using negatives, e.g. Q: Tu as joué au foot? A: je n'ai pas joué au foot. At the modelling stage it would be wise to write up or have displayed examples. Some very proficient classes won't need this.

If the class gets on well, lots of comprehensible language will be exchanged, and repeated uses of past tense forms should help embed gradually more proficient use. The simple acts of guessing and competing provide that little bit of spice to make the task more appealing.

As a twist on this, you could get students to work in groups of three. One member of the group could act as a referee and/or prompter, suggesting ideas or correcting language when they think a clear error has been made. (This partially deals with the possible objection that, without teacher intervention, errors may become embedded or "fossilised".) In any case, you'll have decided whether grammatical accuracy is a priority or not. You may just be happy for the focus o be on input, output and fluency.

Alternatively, in a group of three, each person could simply ask the yes/no questions to the person on their left, working round the group of three in turn. This allows each person to hear more examples and from two different voices.

To reiterate, this type of guessing game is easy to plan and productive. Other simple examples could include:

• Writing a shopping list of 5-10 items which a partner has to guess.
• Guessing what a partner plans to do next weekend (present, near future or future verb forms).
• Guessing five favourite foods or meals.
• (Harder): guessing five things a partner did when at primary school (imperfect tense verb forms).
• Guessing five things a partner bought recently.
• Guessing five things a partner plans to do on holiday (expressing intention).
• Guessing five Christmas presents a partner gave or received.
• Having given one partner some facts about yourself (the teacher), one student has to guess them by asking the other. (Some categories could be written on the board, e.g. age, favourite hobbies, countries visited, languages spoken, favourite foods, etc.) Alternatively, use some facts about a famous person or teaching colleague (with permission!).

I'm sure you can think of others.

To get down to basics, acquisition occurs when there is input students understand and an opportunity to interact with it. If you can build in repetition, so much the better. Whether you favour the skill acquisition view of language learning or the comprehension model (think Krashen), guessing games fulfill help build proficiency and demand little of your valuable time.