One of the best ways to get teenagers to learn new language is to have them practice the target language in a competitive team game. As long as the game is exciting and suspenseful, students will be motivated to use the required language in order to beat their opponents. Older teenagers generally don't like to do work in English class, and getting them to orally practice with each other (in English!) can be a tough mission. So for this next lesson in our Upper-Intermediate Solutions book, I had to find a good way for them to practice the target language: rise gradually, rise sharply, fall gradually, fall sharply, stay the same, increase, decrease... in the context of statistics and graphs.
There are two teams, and each team sends a representative to the board. The teams are handed out a graph, and their goal is to get their representative to draw the graph as accurately as possible by explaining it to them orally. This is where the target language comes in... But of course, as it often happens in ESL classes, and even more so during suspenseful and fast-paced games, students always slip into Vietnamese... Calling for my authoritarian intervention to put them back in English place...
Overall though, the game worked fantastically and I was just left amazed at how closely some students were able to replicate the graphs with their speaking and listening skills!
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