The role of games in teaching english

participant plays the role of Simon and gives 
the others directions, for example by 
saying:”Simon says jump”, or “Simon says stop 
jumping” and then everybody would have to do 
that. If Simon only says “everybody jump” and 
does not attach the phrase “Simon says” at the 
front then the other participants are not be 
supposed to follow the direction. Because of 
this, students need to listen carefully in order 
to know when to follow Simon’s directions and 
when to ignore them. This game can also be 
used to train any vocabulary.
3. Speaking - according to the national 
curriculum, teaching communication is very 
important because of the fact that it plays such 
a big part of knowing a language. The 
curriculum 
also 
claims 
that 
since 
communication is unpredictable in real life, 
students must get the chance to practice 
exactly that and not just to read premade 
conversations. In order to achieve this, the 
curriculum suggests games as a good method.
Even though the importance of teaching 
communication is stressed in the national 
curriculum, some teachers seem to be lacking 
when it comes to actually teaching students to 
communicate. According to a study made on 
English teaching in elementary schools in 
Iceland in 2006 only 10% of English teachers, 
who teach 9th and 10th grade, always use the 
target language in the classroom, 66% of them 
use it often or sometimes, and 24% seldom 
uses it in the classroom. The same study 
showed that students did not use English much 
either. In fact 39% of students said they seldom 
answered their teacher in English and an 
astonishing 75% of students said they did not 
use the target language to communicate with 
their fellow students. Students look up to their 
teachers and when they do not use the target 
language inside the language classroom it 
should not come as a surprise that many 
students do not use it either. Games could be 
helpful in solving this problem because they 
call for communication, and they emphasize 
fluency instead of accuracy, which should 
encourage students to communicate because 
when the emphasis is on fluency students 
usually do not receive much criticism although 
they might make errors. Fluency is an 
important skill to practice because it is what is 
needed in the real world, and in that sense it 
could be said that games provide a necessary 
connection between the classroom and the real 
world. Although games in general might 
emphasize fluency the category speaking 
games can be divided into two main categories. 
Those categories are: linguistic games and 
communicative games. Even though they both 
aim towards teaching speech in the target 

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