Collection of games

The Alphabet Game

Level: Any Level

This game is used to practice alphabet and check their vocabulary. Do as a competition. Divide students into groups of five (it depends on the number of students you have) and ask them to stand in line. Give to the students of the front a marker to write on the whiteboard. Then draw with your finger an imaginary letter of the alphabet on the back of the students at the end of the line. They must do the same with the student in front of him/her and so on. The students with the marker are supposed to run to the board and write any word that begins with that letter.

The spelling games we can use in the developing speaking skills too. It is a half-truth that spelling can be picked up. Voracious readers are often good spellers, but not always, nor does every language learner read voraciously! A wisely planned foreign language course provides for drills and exercises to ensure that spelling in mastered. Fortunately these are readily converted into games.

A few general principles are worth observing.

A lot depends on the visual image of the whole word, which tends to be photographed on the memory. Thus the visual image should never, if we can avoid it, be an incorrect one. Do not write up misspellings on the board and do not allow a misspell word any pupil has written there to remain – rub it out. Refrain also from giving the class words of which the letters have been put in the wrong order. They can only sort them out correctly if they know how to spell the word, and in the process of trying to do so are likely to be confused by several incorrect versions.

Spelling games ought not to be played as if they were only tests. Every spelling game should include or follow a period of study – of the words used in the game.

Words are best introduced to the class in the context of sentences. To focus on the spelling, it is necessary to list them out of context now and then, but not for long. Words like their and there, wait and weight, should always be put into a phrase.

There is point in including words, which the class in general can spell easily.

Spelling exercises and games are not so much needed at an elementary stage, when the learners have seen relatively few words, as later, when they may have seen many. A brief spelling game twice a week (if there are several weekly lesson periods) is probably enough, but a hard-and-fast rule cannot be laid down.

The ability to write the word is the main thing. The first writing is the copying from the board or book of short and fully meaningful sentences, with the meaning of which the learners have become familiar in oral communication. There is no reason to spell these out orally.

If the foreign language alphabet is the same as the mother tongue alphabet, the letter names need not be taught until writing is well under way. It is another matter if the foreign language alphabet is an entirely different one. Then we must give handwriting instruction, and the learners might as well meet with the letter names along with the new letters themselves. But even then there should not be a divorce of what is visually learnt from what has been learnt orally. These new and strange letters make up the sort sentences the learners have already been speaking, and can be ‘found’, with the teacher’s help, in the visual forms of such sentences.

There are some examples on spelling games.

Filling the gaps