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BOARD
GAMES (Jean Moennich)
13 September,
2004
"Board Games in Language
Learning" was the topic of Jean Moennich's presentation this Monday.
Jean's focus was on giving the students not only a visual tool toward
learning the language, but a sense of personal control, taking the teacher
out of the process and placing it with the students.
She had time to demonstrate
three basic board games and showed us others. Each was enormously flexible in
both content and approach. The first was a board game based on the future
perfect tense. It can be used to master any tense coupled with the use of
conjunctions e.g. I left my house because, despite, however....
A general fluency game for basic
beginners shows pictures of food and demands responses with different
pronouns like "I ate chicken. She likes chicken. They ate
chicken"..., and on around the board over the various foods.
Torn pieces of colored paper
and/or coins and/or erasers can be substituted for chips/men and dice in
playing of the games so the supplies needed to play them are readily
available. These board games are also simple to make.
One of the more complex and more
advanced games is "Round the World" (See attachment : Trip 1 and2)
which gives realistic encounters one would have during travel. It contains
"Hazards" and risks giving students an emergency vocabulary for
conditions as common as lost luggage to the extreme situation of customs
officers finding a zip lock bag full of white powder in your suitcase.
"Framed, I've been framed!" comes to mind.
The final board game was Grammar
Monopoly (See attachment)) where the risk is financial as well as
"face". Here, Jean has ingeniously included a chance to stay at a
hotel for free if the student can correct a wrong sentence on a card. If not,
money is deducted from a sum fixed at the beginning of the game in each
student's "bank book."
Flexibility is found here too as
you can play until everyone is broke, set a sum to be reached or a number of
rounds to be played before the game ends. The teacher can also take mistakes
from previous assignments to put on the cards, personalizing the play
further.
For advanced students of English
literature, Jean has also designed a game based on quotes and plot summaries,
in her case from Treasure Island.
The beauty of the board games is that, once laminated, they last and can be
reworked easily for different levels and situations by adding new risk cards
to previous ones, upping the ante on several tasks or changing the language
requirements of the challenge.
They
effectively make learning more fun than rote classroom drill and they give
the addition of visual cues and interaction. A time saver and a class saver
on all counts.
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