Digital Gaming Teaching And Language Learning

Barcelona 4th ELT Conference Adapting free online games for English language Learning

Do you teach English as a foreign language?

Do you teach young learners?

Do you want to use online computer games in class to engage your learners?

Then you have come to the right place.

You can use online computer games for all kinds of different skills work.

Speaking

Reading

Writing

Listening

You just have to figure out how to adapt them.

Here’s a really basic example for really young learners.

www.pacman.net

Have you ever played this game?

I use Pacman to drill ‘(turn) left’, ‘(turn) right’, (go) up’, and ‘(go) down’.

You don’t look at the screen.

Your learners shout out the directions.

You listen and use the keyboard.

Don’t forget to use the ‘pause button’!

How do you keep score?

Use the game as a warmer at the start of a class and learners beat their previous class score.

Put the class into teams – the team with the highest score wins.

Record other class scores and set different classes up against each other.

If that was a little chaotic for you try this game:

www.gamebalance.com/games/orbox.html

You still practice up, down, left and right but you can take your time.

How to play

Use the arrow keys to guide your square to the red square. Be careful you don't fall into space. Press the Space Bar to restart a level if you get stuck.

That was fun wasn’t it?

Would you like to play some more?

Would your learners like to play and learn some more?

How good are your learners with their . . .

A B C s?

This one’s a good one for . . . spelling,.

www.miniclips.com/games/es/

Here’s how my learners played the game . . .

If you want a lesson plan you’ll have to go here . . .

http://tiny.cc/pT938

How about colours?

www.miniclip.com/games/sveerz/en/

Choose:

Play online

Play the arcade version

What’s this game like? Remember these games?

For this game put your learners like this:

They watch and repeat the colours in the game.

You listen and click the mouse on the coloured balls.

Of course this is only for the colours red , green , yellow and blue

Why not let one of your learners take your place?

Now I’ll show you a great reading activity.

This practices:

Colours

Clothes

Parts of the body

Here’s the text:

He’s got spiky red hair, big blue eyes, big ears and a mouth like a clown. He’s got a nose that looks like a cat’s nose.

He’s wearing a long green coat with a purple waistcoat underneath and red trousers. He’s not wearing any shoes.

He’s got a friend. His friend is a dog called spot. His name is spot because he’s brown with two white spots. One spot is on his back and the other spot is over his eye. Spot is standing up on two legs.

Here’s the website:

And here’s how you set up your class:

Pin the text on the wall (top left green line).

Learners are in pairs.

Taking it in turns they go read the text.

They dictate the text to their partner who makes the hero

If all goes well they should get something like this:

Why not show them it and talk about how many differences they can spot between this one and theirs.

Hero machine can generate quite a bit of language with your learners.

I like this one. . .

. . . because . . .

I used to play this as a kid: www.toptrumps.com

The Rules:

All learners have a card. The starting player selects a category from the top card and reads out its value. Each other player then reads out the value of the same category from their cards. The best (usually the largest) value wins and the winner takes all the other cards and places them at the bottom of their pile. That player then looks at their new topmost card, and chooses the category for the next round.

If there is a draw, the cards are placed in the middle and a new category is chosen from the next card by the same person as in the previous round. The winner of that round gets all of the cards in the middle as well as the top card from each player.