Adapting Board Games for Language Practice: A Workshop
Margaret Orleans
Adapting Board Games for Language Practice: A Workshop
Margaret Orleans (Seinan Jo Gakuin University)
Kitakyushu JALT, January 14, 2012
Following the advice of Guy Cook (1997) that students should be playing with their new language right from the start, Orleans gave us, and got us to think of, ideas of how to facilitate enjoyable repetition of useful vocabulary and grammatical structures, enhance awareness of lexical rules (and the extent to which they can be bent and broken) and ensure student investment through personalization of the target language. From her large collection of commercial board games, Orleans started with the popular Clue, eliciting opinions on its usefulness in the language classroom and how it might be adapted for specific teaching objectives. A principle recommendation was to have students devise their own materials as much as possible to encourage interest and ensure the level is appropriate. Other considerations are amount of exposure to language coupled with extent of encouragement of competition and argument to get the spoken language out.
Following this, in pairs and threes we learned new games and devised possible adaptations to share and discuss with the total group, then received printouts of rules for several more. On the whiteboard, Orleans illustrated examples of how she had stimulated her students' creative writing by exploiting various board game materials.
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