Teach English as a Foreign Language Successfully with Grammar games

When you start to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL), you have to make your classes both educational and entertaining. One way to do this, and make sure you are successful when you teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) is by using grammar games.

As well as deciding what lesson structure to use for grammar points, and how best to introduce them, another important consideration is what games and activities we can use to give the students a fun way of practising using their new grammar point.

Finding the best games to use for a particular lesson can by one of the most satisfying aspects of teaching English as a foreign language, as it is a moment where we can let our imaginations run riot. Any type of communicative game can be transformed into a grammar game, sometimes all it takes is a small tweak. Here are some that we can use in the classroom, and ideas of the grammar point it can be used for.

Examples of how to Teach English as a Foreign Language with Grammar Games

Twenty questions is traditionally a game where you choose an object, person or animal, and the others have twenty yes or no questions to work out who or what you are. This can be tweaked a multitude of ways as a grammar game, but as an example, for learning how to rephrase questions and answers, by having the main player answer with a sentence (rather than only yes or no), we can give them many examples to practise.

Another ´guess who´ game, that we don’t even need to adapt, is Taboo, a conversational card game. Often used in one-to-one classes, the card has a subject at the top which the student will need to elicit from the other players, however they will need to do this without using any words from the list of related words printed underneath. This tends to mean that they will usually have to come up with a more convoluted description and flex their grammatical knowledge.

A further example of a grammar game is role playing being a fortune-teller, and having each student come up in turn to have their fortune told, and then tell the fortune of the others. This is a great way of practising future tense with a group of students. A sense of humour is needed for this game, so make sure to create the correct atmosphere beforehand!

These are just a few examples as to how to teach English as a foreign language in a fun and educational way!