The Spirit of Real Games

The aim is to find games which learners would enjoy playing in their out-of-classroom lives. The experience of teaching foreign languages shows that many learners are prepared to take part in games and activities which they would consider a little juvenile or rather boring in the mother tongue. However, there is a limit to learners’ goodwill and we should not stray far from the aim of introducing games worth playing in their own right. It is often the activity expected of a learner which makes it into an acceptable game, or, on the other hand, into a mechanical exercise. One example of this must suffice.

The teacher places a number of pens, pencils, etc. in various places on the desk and asks a learner, for example, “ Where is the red pen? ” As the red pen is obviously in the book, the learner understands the question as, “ What sentence in English describes the position of the pen? ”

However, suppose the teacher says, “ Look carefully at the pens, pencils, etc. Now turn round, Where’s the red pen? Can you remember? ” In this case the learner’s powers of memory are challenged and he/she is motivated to think and speak. And, most importantly, he/she is more likely to understand the question in a similar way to a native speaker.

The essential ingredient of a game is challenge, but challenge is not synonymous with competition. Games should depend on cooperation in accepting problems and searching for solutions to them.