When you begin teaching EFL or ESL to children, you quickly learn that there are many thousands of games you can play in class. Even at the kindergarten level, I’ve read descriptions of more than 1,000 different games, and tried more than 200 games in my classes.
There’s still only a small handful that I find to be really worthwhile playing though.
In that respect, one of the best things you can do is to quickly learn how to determine what makes for a good game (or activity) for learning purposes. It was quite surprising for me to learn that many, if not most, games played in language classrooms actually aren’t good (or optimal) from a learning perspective.
However, there’s another distinction that is important to make.
One day our centre manager decided to illustrate to the teachers the difference between games and activities, in a way I will never forget.
At the beginning of the training session he had us all brainstorm our very best games ideas.
We were then asked to individually share our best games for teaching children. (In this workshop, we were focusing more on young children rather than very young learners or children under 6 years old.) After we’d shared some of our most creative, and fun games, he then made the following statement:
Forget games and start using activities.
He then proceeded to demonstrate to us how powerful an activity can be by facilitating an activity with the group. First, he started by entering the room and exclaiming how hungry he was. Next, he proceeded to unfold and unpack a group activity, layer by layer. He worked with us individually, in pairs, and with the group. It was highly engaging, interactive, and involved natural and authentic interactions.
All of the teachers in the workshop were speechless.
It was clear to us, that even the best of games could likely only have tapped a small fraction of what we’d just powerfully experienced. While the trainer was an exceptionally gifted teacher with many years experience under his belt, what he had shown us was achievable by us all.
At the kindergarten level though, its important to use lots of fun games. Given the lack of language that students at this age have access to, its harder to design really good activities that are appropriate for them. That said, children really love authentic language exchanges, like role-plays.
However, as children get older, and start moving through Starter and levels beyond, the value that can be achieved by a well-designed activity can far exceed that of most games. I believe, the higher the level of class, the balance should start moving away from games to more activities in he class.
