Some Views on Language Games

Hi, everyone. How’s life so far? I think most of us have been anticipating for the coming language camps, right? From what I have noticed through my teaching practicum few months ago, language games are somehow effective in motivating students to learn English. During my teaching practicum, I was given two classes in which the students were hardly interested in learning English. Sometimes, it really disappointed me as they didn’t take any initiative to learn. However, one thing that has stimulated me to carry on was that they would participate actively in language games. Usually when it came to the last period of the day, it was an uphill task for me to catch the students’ attention as they were so eager to go back and at the same time easily be distracted by the noise outside the class. I found it effective to keep students’ attention “in place” through playing some games with them. Needless to come out with very sophisticated ones, games as easy as a crossword puzzle would help much in capturing their interest.

From the language game workshop last week, I noticed that language games are actually capable of capturing attention of adults (like us) as well, particularly when it was do done in a competitive mode. We have had a lot of fun and laughter, haven’t we? I do hope the participants of the language camps will benefit from playing the games. Thanks to all the groups that have been painstakingly preparing for respective games.

Below are some of my personal opinions and views that I would like share with all of you:

(a) Despite the fact that language games can motivate learners to learn, and they will surely have an enjoyable moment while playing them, we should not overlook the essential role of input delivery. What is the most important criterion in selecting a language game? Is it not the input that they learn through playing the game? Or to the least extent the reinforcement of the input that has been taught before, if not new input. My supervisor for teaching practicum gave me three questions to reflect on in preparation as well as the end of any lesson which I find important to make sure we have conduct a meaningful lesson. I am only highlighting one of them here, which is “What can the students learn in my lesson or the activities I conduct?” Therefore, I would like to strongly emphasize the input delivery part before any language game. The students need to be given some input so that they will be able to apply the particular input in playing the games later. In other words, the language games should be parallel to the teaching part. We should not conduct any language games for the sake of conducting it. If the students do not learn anything, the efforts being put into the games are in vain. If the students do not learn much from playing games, there are countless methodologies out there that we might need to consider. Why for to have language games? Honestly speaking, I have got a feeling that a low proficiency student will not gain much (in terms of language improvement) in the language camp if they are merely playing the games without been given much input. I noticed that in some of our lesson plans, there is no specific content been given. Although I do believe in the community language teaching (CLT) theory which suggests that learner come out with their own learning content which is parallel to their current language level, I still think that they won’t learn much in this way. Bear in mind that our language camp participants are low proficiency university students. We need to conduct games in line wit their language level and I believe most of us have already done so. Besides, we should also make sure that our games would cater to their needs, either for academic needs or for basic survivor needs.

(b) I do question about the way we select the games to carry out for the language camps. I think it was not sufficient enough to cover the different aspects of language learning. Noticed that we have quite a number of language games focusing on the word level. I know the importance of vocabulary acquisition in language learning, yet I think that if we focus too much on word level alone, the students will not gain much. I doubt the participants will learn much of the new vocabularies presented in the games as the words are only introduced with no explanation given. Additionally, they do not have the context from which they can deduce meaning as the words were all presented in isolation. Even if the participants have learned some new vocabularies, I doubt whether or not they are likely to attain the words in their internal lexical system, needless to say to use the words in their daily lives. My suggestion for the selection of language games to be conducted during language camps is that we should come out with the objectives and learning outcomes that are expected first. After that different groups need to be assigned different areas (namely the listening, reading, speaking, writing, vocabulary and grammar as well as spelling level, word level, sentence level, or paragraph level etc) to think of for the games, so that there is a balance in the aspects being focused on. This is to avoid too many groups coming out with the same aspects. I suggest that the way of choosing the games for language camps need to be looked into.

These are only some of my limited opinions. I might be wrong in some sense as I look at it only from the language learning and teaching perspective. You might have seen from other angles, such as the practicality of implementation in the given time span and so forth. I apologize if what I have written here has offended anyone of you. Do correct me if I am wrong.