The role of games in teaching english

participants have to walk a line and perform 
various types of tasks at the same time, for 
example walking backwards, or balancing a 
book on their heads (Ingvar Sigurgeirsson.. In 
order to make this game more fitting in a 
language classroom the teacher should give the 
instructions in the target language, for example 
“everybody has to walk backwards”. Another 
example of a physical game could be the game 
“Simon says”, where someone plays Simon and 
gives the others orders, for example “Simon 
says jump” or “Simon says clap your hands”. I 
categorize this game as a physical game 
because of the fact that the Simon’s orders are 
usually physical.
Activities like “Simon says” fits into a 
teaching method called Total Physical 
Response (TPR) in which languages is taught 
by allowing students to observe and take their 
time to understand the language before having 
to speak it. TPR is thought to be a good 
teaching method for learning a foreign 
language for two reasons. The first one is that it 
is thought to reduce the stress level of learning 
a language and therefore making the learning 
more enjoyable, and the second one is that it 
resembles the learning of children’s native 
language, where children are exposed to the 
language for many months before starting to 
talk.
Scavenger hunt games - savage hunt 
games are especially fitting in the language 
classroom because the clues can be written in 
the target language, which forces the 
participants to read and fellow team members 
to listen and test their understanding. Also 
within the scavenger hunt could be puzzles, 
which the students would have to solve, such 
as crossword puzzles, word searches and 
questions. The possibilities are almost endless 
and teachers are only bound by the limits of 
their own creativity.
Educational games - the “mail game” 
where participants have to deliver “mail” and 
make sure it gets to the right places works as 
an excellent example of an educational game. 
For languages a good idea would be to work 
around a theme of a certain place, such as the 
home. The first thing the teacher has to do is to 
make the envelopes and the “mail”. The 
envelopes should be labeled with a specific 
genre, which in this example would be 
“kitchen”, “bedroom”, “bathroom” etc. The mail 
should then be letters with words on them that 
fit into specific envelopes, for example the 
word “knife” or the word “refrigerator” would 
match the envelope labeled “kitchen”. Each 
student should then get a certain amount of 
“mail” that he has to write his name on and 
then get to work delivering. The first one to 
deliver all of his mail would win if it turned out 
he delivered correctly.
Theoretical expression games - the 
game “who am I?” fits perfectly into the 
theoretical expression category. In this game 
the class is usually divided into two teams and 
then one by one students stand in front of the 
whole class and act out a specific profession, 
which the teacher has given them. The teams 
take turns in guessing or asking questions, but 
the actor can only reply to questions by 
answering yes or no. The scoring can then be 
managed in a way that one point would be 
given to a team that asks a question, which is 
replayed with a yes answer and 5 points would 
be given to the team that figures out who the 
actor is playing.
Drawing- and coloring games - an 
example of a game from the category: drawing- 
and coloring games can be a game called 

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