Using games in Language Teaching

Why use games in the classroom???

As I said before, making use of  games has helped me a lot in my classes, why? There are five main reasons why I use games in my classes; they are:

1. Games motivate students: I have discovered that when I use games in the class, my students are more willing to participate and share their ideas with others and that they get more interesting in the class. 

2. Games can involve all the basic langiage skills: there are a great deal of game that you can use in order to help your students improve their four macro skills( listening, reading, speaking, and writing)

Games in the classroom??????????????

To make my students participate in the class was the most difficult challenge I had to overcome. As I said in my last entry, the first thing I did, in order to overcome it,  was to make  my students aware of the purpose of the activities; however, it did not work as I expected since after that, half of the students still remained very passive. So one class, I decided not to bring any warm-up or activity to the class; what I did was just to go straight to grammar points and to assign them a great deal of written work, as they were accustomed to.

 

Suddenly, some students asked me “Teacher, aren’t we going to play any game today? When they told me that, I realized that they were expecting me to bring something new and interesting to the class, but I told them “ummmm I thought you dislike them because you do not participate”  “ Yes, we like them bring more and we’ll participate!” they answered.

So the next class, I brought them a mimic game, and I’m really proud to say that most of them participated even the girls who were  used to be just making-up their faces.

Through this situation, I could realized that using games or warm-ups helped me to make my students participate in class and to create a good atmosphere and a community in the classroom; besides that, using games in my classes, helped me to teach my students in a more funny and creative way. I realized that my students were more willing to learn and participate in class when I brought a game to the class. So using games in the classroom is very important. We will see why in my next entry.

The challenge I face while doing my teaching practice!

Since the first moment I started my first class, my students noticed a big change. They had been taught in the traditional way of teaching; they were accustomed to be very busy with written tasks during all the classes; they were primarily taught grammatical structures, nothing about developing their four macro skills. So when I asked my students to participate in some activities, they were very confused about what I was doing, and they did not wanted to participate; they were very afraid of making mistakes.

Besides that, they understood nothing about English, so I had to go down to their English level and tried to enrich their vocabulary by exposing them to every day class language which I tried to use in all my classes. Thanks God, at the end of my teaching practice, all my students perfectly mastered all that vocabulary.

                                                        

So, to make my students participate in class and work with listening, reading, and speaking activities was a complete challenge for me. At the beginning, I realized that they thought they were just wasting their time; that’s why, what I did was to make them aware of the purpose of the activities I was developing. After that, the 50% of the students started to participate in class. However, half of the class still remained kind of passive.

My first class!!

 

 

My first class was very complicated since I had to teach a very large class, 48 talkative and showing off students. This is the first time I’m exposed to a class with such number of students; the first thing that came to my mind was what did I have to do in order to control the class, not to let the class control me!

I was terrified just thinking about going to teach. While being in front of the class, I realized that my students were accustomed to just receive knowledge.  I quickly notice that they were empty glasses just waiting to be filled with knowledge, so I felt that there was a huge wall between the students and me.

Since the beginning of the class, I tried to make my students have an active role in the class; I made them participate a lot; something they were not accustomed to. That’s why, since the first moment, my students were looking at me like asking themselves “what is she doing? What does she expect from us?” 

So what I did was to tell them what I expected from them, and I also gave them the opportunity to ask me what they expected from me; however, just one student answered me “you be nice” That’s all he said.

Then I started the class, and I realized that the boys were the ones who participated the most and completed all the tasks they were supposed to do. On the other hand, girls were the less interested in their studies. It seems that they go to the high school just to flirt with boys; they were making up their faces and gossiping about others. When I noticed it, I encouraged them to do what they were supposed to do, but the teacher told me “ don’t pay too much attention to them; they do not care about learning” However, I decided to continue looking around them in order to encourage them to work in class.