Teaching English as a foreign language textbooks are bursting at the spines with lively games and activities. I know this because I've tried all of them. But they weren't particularly helpful with one slothful, unresponsive class I was teaching in Prague.
Scouring through the likes of New English File and Headway, I laboriously plucked role plays, word searches and charade-style games in an attempt to engage the 19-year-olds. All my attempts were greeted with teenage tuts, moans and, at best, a cool indifference.
The class, it seemed, had zero motivation to learn English and my attempts to make it interesting or – dare I say it? – fun, were frustratingly pointless. So in desperation I turned to the spectacled world of Bob Holness and Blockbusters. And my painfully passive students went mad for it.
Competitiveness, previously devoid in the class, roared into life and the iPhone-glued gazes of even the grumpiest students were now directed at the Blockbusters grid. The vocabulary I'd previously assumed had been collectively ignored had somehow wormed its way into their apathetic brains – and suddenly they were all clamouring to prove it to me.
Buoyed by this unexpected success, I introduced a new game show the following week: Family Fortunes. Gathering questions from internet quiz sites, I even downloaded the "eurgh eurgh" sound to my mobile for extra realism. It worked. Not only were the students desperate to press the sound effect to highlight their classmates' folly, they also – to my surprise – began scribbling the new vocabulary into their notebooks. Through these 80s game shows, the class had finally woken up.
The next week I tried another and by the end of the year, I'd built up a veritable gameshow arsenal. The promise of the games proved to be a real motivation for them to concentrate for the rest of the lesson – and when they sat their exams at the end of the year, seven of the eight passed. I know that without these games the result would have been very different.
Watching Les Dennis all those years ago, I hardly imagined I'd be standing in a Czech classroom apeing him, but I'm glad I did. It has certainly made my lessons more engaging – and it didn't just save my students; it saved my teaching sanity as well.
So here's my guide on how to turn 80s gameshows into teaching tools:
Blockbusters
A fun, competitive game, which is great for revising vocab.
Draw a 5x5 Blockbuster grid on the board (alternatively, use a printout). Designate one colour to the team going across the grid, and another to the team going down. Then, starting with the middle letter, ask a vocabulary question to two opposing players, for example, "What M is the opposite of majority?" The person who shouts the correct answer first gets the letter coloured in their team's colour, and that team chooses the letter for the next question.
Then ask a new question to two new rival players. This continues until one team has formed an unbroken colour chain in their direction across the grid. As a variety, fill the grid with phrasal verbs, such as break down, or compound nouns like fire engine.
Blankety Blank
Les Dawson's innuendo-based game is hilarious, and surprisingly good for training so/such, and uncountable/plural nouns.
Write – or scour the internet for – a list of harmless innuendo questions, replacing the "rude" word with a blank. For example, "Jane had never seen Santa Claus with such an amazing 'blank' before."
Choose two contestants. At the first question, the first contestant – and the remaining students – write an answer. If the contestant writes "beard'', for example, and two other people have also written it, they get two points. Then it's the other student's turn. Repeat until one contestant has a winning total.
Catchword
This almost forgotten daytime TV show is perfect for spelling practice and developing word formation.
On flashcards, write 15 sequences of three letters, eg "E V L". Show the first card to the class, giving them a few seconds to write a word, then the second and so on, until all 15 cards have been shown. Their words must start with the first letter and include the other two in that order. Each letter is worth one point. So "evil" would get 4 points and "evaluation" 10. The students must spell the longer words out – and they must be correct. The student with the most points wins.
Family Fortunes
A great, end-of-lesson game to revise vocabulary.
Print a stack of Family Fortunes questions from the internet. The individual answers should total 100. To start, ask a question to two opposing players a question, eg, "We asked 100 people to name something made of rubber..." The student who says the higher-value answer chooses to "play" or "pass" the round. If they play, the members of their team take it in turns to guess the other answers. Write correct answers on the board, and for wrong ones, write X. When they have 3 Xs, the other team has one chance to win the round. Together, they must guess just one of the missing answers. If they do, they get all the points. If not, the first team gets them.
Mallett's Mallet
Timmy Mallett's hammer-thwacker is a fun word association game.
To start, say a random word to the first student, eg "grass", who must say a word connected to it, eg "green" or "flowers". The next person has to say a word linked to the previous word, then the next and so on. If a student hesitates, repeats a word or says nonsense, bop them (with some an inflatable, or some rolled-up newspaper). Each student has two lives, and the last person standing is the winner.
