The role of games in teaching english

NOVATEUR PUBLICATIONS
JournalNX- A Multidisciplinary Peer Reviewed Journal
ISSN No:
 
2581 - 4230
 
VOLUME 7, ISSUE 6, June. -2021
 
392 | 
P a g e
“drawing in a foreign language”. That game is 
very similar to the “who am I” game from the 
category above but the only difference is that 
the students have to draw on the blackboard 
instead of acting, and they could be working 
with other types of vocabulary than 
professions, for example nouns, verbs or 
adjectives.
Educational 
card 
games 
- 
one 
educational card game is Bingo, which is an 
excellent activity to use in language teaching 
because the teacher can draw words and the 
students only have pictures on their bingo 
cards or vice versa. That way the students have 
to understand the words to be able to match it 
to the right picture.
Word games - word games can be 
especially good for language teaching. Included 
here are crossword puzzles and word searches 
where students get the words in their native 
tongue but they are hidden in the word search 
and only match the crossword puzzle in the 
target language. Also it is easy asking students 
to use the target language in the game “Filling 
in a chart” where participants have to find, for 
example a country, a city, an animal, or a type 
of food.
Story games - an excellent example of a 
game from the category: story games, is the 
game “to tell a story”. The participants sit in a 
circle and one of them gets the role of the story 
teller. The teacher whispers one word into the 
ear of each student and asks him or her to 
remember it. Then the storyteller begins telling 
a story and every now and then he stops and 
points at a student who then has to say the 
word the teacher has whispered to him. The 
storyteller then has to incorporate this word 
into the story, and that usually has amusing 
consequences. This game fits into language 
teaching perfectly because the story would be 
told in the target language and the words 
would also be in the target language.
Question games - a good game in the category: 
question games, is the game “riddles about 
European countries”. The students get divided 
into pairs and each pair gets assigned a specific 
country and the task of preparing a small riddle 
about it, such as
“It has many horses, it is surrounded by 
sea, and there you cannot travel by train” 
Answer: Iceland
After each pair has made their riddle 
they would be asked to come to the front of the 
class and ask the other pairs to solve the riddle. 
The other pairs then have to write down what 
they think the right answer is and when all 
pairs have asked their riddles all the answers 
are collected and the pair with the most correct 
answers wins.