with high intermediate to advanced students. A crime occurs (be creative – something to do with the vocabulary you are trying to target would be ideal) and three students from the class are accused. They were all together at the time of the crime, and need to submit an alibi. Have them leave the room for five minutes to decide exactly what they were doing. Explain to the students that they will be questioned separately and that the questions will be very specific (“where in the movie theater were you sitting?”) so that they can adequately prepare. Then, each of the three students should enter, one at a time, to answer other students’ questions. Once all three have answered, the rest of the class can compare stories to find inconsistencies.
This is a variation of the popular game where students have to find matches between two cards that have the same thing printed on them. The added difficulty to this game is that they have to find pairs in logical order of a sentence. Break classes into two or more teams. Place the cards with individual words on them face down in a grid, such as the following, that would test knowledge of nouns, verbs, and pronouns:
Each team is allowed to ask you to turn over two cards (for example, A1 and C2). If the two are the same, and they logically follow the previous pair found in a sentence, they get a point. In this example, the first pair picked to get a point will have to be “The school” or “The girls.” The next pair picked will have to be the verb that agrees with the noun ( “The girls grades,” isn’t correct) and so on until all of the sentences are made. Meaning of the sentences is not as important as noun-verb agreement, as long as students understand the meaning of the sentences they are creating.
Find a story, replace several words with blank spaces, and write which type of speech the missing word should be:
The ____________________________ dance gracefully under the _________.
The (number > 1) (adjective) (plural noun) dance gracefully under the (noun).
Students can work in pairs or small groups, share the resulting stories with each other, and later share them all (or the group’s funniest) with the class.
Divide the class into two teams. Have two stacks of cards ready with parts of speech written on them, and ordered in such a way that they could make a logical sentence (article, noun, verb, pronoun, noun, preposition, article, noun.) The first person in each team runs to you, you hand the student the first card in his or her team’s stack and the student writes an appropriate word on the board. The students then run back to tag the next person, who comes to get the second grammar card from you, and so on. Stop the game when the first team finishes the sentence. Teams get a point for each word that fits into the appropriate grammatical group and fits into the sentence.