You've probably heard of the retrieval practice effect (aka the testing effect). It's all the rage in England and for pretty good reasons. Good teachers have always assumed it strengthens students' memories to test them on material they have previously learned and may forget. Multiple studies have confirmed the power of the retrieval practice effect. In a nutshell, the idea is that we test to learn, not just to test. Gianfranco and I wrote about it in our book Memory: What Every Language Teacher Should Know (2021).
Over a year or more I have been designing low-prep starters for frenchteacher.net and today I added another retrieval practice starter on basic vocabulary. This one, 'Pyramid memory speed test' also encourages students to recall quickly, fostering what researchers such as Paul Nation and Norman Segalowitz might call cognitive fuency. Cognitive fluency, the ability to quickly retrieve language from memory, is vital for communication of course, so anything we do in the classroom to help build cognitive fluency is likely to be useful.
The pyramid memory game puts students under time pressure. It's explained in the slide below, after which there are two examples of slides fearuring beginner vocabulary. The game also requires a lots of repetitions of the same words.
The only caveat I'd like to point out is that this little competitive game is all about the retrieval and production of isolated words. As you know, in general I prefer activities during which students use chunked or connected language, since this is what they will need to do to communicate. (A basic rule of thumb for learning is that you get good at what you practise.) But for beginners who are building their vocabulary, I can see a place for sometimes teaching through isolated words.
For another use of pyramids see this post by Silvia Bastow which includes Gianfranco Conti's 'pyramid translation' game which Gianfranco and I described also in Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (2019).
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