Engaging Grammar Instruction Through Games

Thanks to all of you who are joining us for this celebration of Grammar Day. So in this presentation, the title is Grammar, Not Just Fun and Games. And we're doing this in celebration of this day. So let's see what we're going to do here. So all of my examples are going to come from a series that I was the lead author on. But I think in... Every case, you should be able to apply it with whatever you're using. But I think I'm biased, but I think these are really good resources. So like any good teacher, we're going to talk about the agenda a little bit. We're going to have a couple parts in this presentation. We'll have a quick look at the title. We're going to ask the question, are games effective for grammar instruction? We're going to look at four examples of games or activities that are very engaging for students. And then we'll wrap up and leave plenty of time for questions. So a quick look at our title. I think our title kind of has two meanings or two senses. You know, grammar, not just fun and games or grammar, not just fun and games. I can't really do the prosody correctly to get it. But I think that the first one, first meaning that. could have is that grammar is not fun. And I mean, given that we're all gathered here today on Grammar Day, I would imagine that most of us think grammar is fun. But sometimes our students don't think that. So hopefully in this presentation, we'll see how we can maybe get some students who are maybe not thinking grammar is fun, but encouraging them to see how it can be fun. And the other meaning of the title, The other meaning that I think the title could have is that grammar is more than just fun and games. It's important. So let's see where we end up at the end of this webinar. So I think the first question, are games effective for grammar instruction? I think that's a really important question to ask ourselves and to also think about just in general when we're teaching. Why are we choosing to teach what we're teaching? And why are we choosing to teach it in the way we're teaching it? So I think those are questions that are always good to ask ourselves before we plan our lesson. And then also afterwards, we can think, was that effective? You know, were the students engaged? Where was the practice I did contextualized and meaningful? So I think that games can be very effective. If they provide practice for the target form or the structure in context, just randomly reciting grammar rules or randomly going through a chart, I don't think is very effective because we're not emphasizing the structure in context. And granted, we need to practice in context in a controlled manner and then move to more open ended. But the context is important. And I'm not saying grammar charts aren't important. They're a nice resource for us and for our students. But it's not that much fun to say, I am, you are, he is. So grammar can also, the games can be very effective if the practice is engaging. And I think that putting students in teams or having individuals competing in a nice environment, not in a cutthroat environment. But. competing for points or some type of an acknowledgement or a certificate or an award. I think those can be helpful in making grammar games and any kind of vocabulary games, any kind of practice that needs to be done engaging. So we're going to take a look at some examples of games, of grammar games, and we're going to look at four different games, four different activity games. So we'll take a quick look at Kahoot. We'll look at a game that I'm calling tense competition. Then we'll look at two parts of a game, grammar inside and outside of the classroom, and right around the room. The last one is my very favorite. So how many of you, maybe you can put this in the chat, how many of you use Kahoot or know about Kahoot? Lots of you. Okay, good. Yeah. And I think Kahoot is really great. And, you know, we can use it in lots of different ways. And We there's been some research in 2020, not 1920. In 2020, Wang and Tahir did a major study looking at the effectiveness of Kahoot. And they surveyed 93 published research articles. So these were genuine research articles vetted by peer review. And there were lots of different types of studies. There were case studies where they look specifically at a smaller section. There were large experiments. And in all of these, they found that using Kahoot has a positive effect on learning performance, meaning that your students are going to be learning more effectively. It also improved classroom dynamics, student attitude, and lowered anxiety. So those are all great things. And I'd like to say, you know, Kahoot is... Great. It's a lot of fun. I think we can also assume that I'm going to make the extension that this research on Kahoot, where it's done in an engaging way, and it is sort of a competition with Kahoot. And sometimes we're in teams and sometimes we're competing individually. I think that we can extend this to say that using games effectively in our classroom would also have these positive effects on learning and also lowering anxiety. And for those of you who... have used Kahoot! many times you have to make your own material, but Grammar and Beyond actually has material already developed. So we'll take a little quick look at the material, some of the material that's available for you, even if you're not using Grammar and Beyond. So this is what Kahoot! looks like in a unit that's already developed. You can see the questions are shown here. You can also preview the questions. So you know what the right answer is in case you're unsure. You can assign this to students if you're actually in Kahoot with Grammar and Beyond. And then this is what it can look like. It often focuses on errors that are typical that students make. And I think when we read the gap fill, like I'm not so tired after class this way, you can almost hear your students' voices. But the one that I like the best is this one, I amn't, because that's just a really quirky thing about English, the way we contract am not. We don't do it that way. So we can't say I'm not. So you can't say I amn't. You have to say I'm not. So I think that's really useful that this is informed by by research as to what the what the examples are. And then we see there's the correct one. And you can see your answer streak and you can see your points. So I think this is a nice example of a way that an app can be used to encourage gaming and can be practiced. You could assign it to students to do at home or you can actually do it as competitions in your class. So now we'll look at the second game. I call it a tense game and it's kind of a play on words. I like to play with words. And here we have a chart and we're looking at past tense and we're showing how past tense with regular verbs and past tense with irregular verbs. We go through the chart and then down here we see data from the real world. And this is some a feature that's in every unit of grammar and beyond. And it shows from research these verbs like work, start, live are very common, regular, simple past tense verbs. And below that, we see go and come and take. These are the most frequent irregular simple verbs that are occurring in simple past. So we know we want to practice those verbs. We know that they're really important. And so how can we practice this in a controlled manner, starting out at first to be very controlled? So here we have a gap fill activity. And, you know, we could just sit down and have students do that in class. That would be something, but it wouldn't be very engaging. We could have them do it for homework and come in and check that. But it might be more fun if we actually took the reading and we could project it on the board or we could write some of the examples on the board. We can, you know, if we do it as a PowerPoint, we can blow it up. If your school has Presentation Plus, you can project it. And then you could put students in numbered teams. Each team would have a number. Excuse me. then you could call out a number and the team would run up and write the answer in the gap fill activity. This would be a little bit more engaging or every student. So if you have you know, there is actually in this actual exercise, I'm only showing you 14 of the gaps, but they're actually 25 in that reading that you saw. And you could actually as students come in, just be handing them numbers, you know, hand out random numbers and then call a number out and the student has to run up and fill it. So it. would mean that maybe number 10 is getting filled out before number nine, and then you can go through and read the reading. The other thing that I want to point out is that unlike many times when we have practice, this actually turns into a coherent text. So the students aren't just jumping from one topic to another, you know, line one might be about, sometimes we have like, you know, my friends met in middle school. I want to eat a peanut butter sandwich when I get home. My dog stayed with my neighbors. All these random things. It's not cohesive. Whereas this way, we're actually practicing language in a meaningful context. We're actually creating a story by putting these verbs in. So these next two activities are, I think, really helpful. because it's really focused on the students and the students in your class. So I think I sometimes call this investigators inside the classroom. Sometimes I call it detectives. I don't know. I felt when I was working on this, the detectives sounded funny. So, or maybe odd. So I made it investigators. And so. What you want to do in this is, you know, you're getting writing, you're hearing your students speaking, you're knowing, excuse me, you know what your students are struggling with, you know what's hard for them. And so I like to pick one or two things that I've noticed that they're struggling with and put it on the board. So this is an example from a fifth grade class that I was working with. They had trouble with modals, knowing that you didn't have to inflect. verb after that. So you'd see yesterday I could finish all my homework and Tom is study. So there's a time issue in both of these past tense and also ongoing. So students come in, you have this on the board before the students arrive, and then they come in. And they look at the board. They know, come in, look at the board. They write the sentence with the error and they fix it. So they each student individually fixes each of these two sentences in this example. And then they they talk. We talk about this as a class just at the beginning. How did you fix it? How did you fix it? And this is a nice way to talk about what's wrong, to have students work individually, but then hear how other people fix. fix the error and in some cases not necessarily in these um you could there are many different ways to fix it so um it's good to talk about that and to see how changing how you fix it changes the language and it's also um much more effective if students have a little journal and they do this in the journal and i think it's also good because then they're getting practice writing especially in this case, these were fifth graders. And also then they have this journal and they have these incorrect and then correct corrected sentences. And this serves as a resource. So when they're writing, they can have this on their desk and, or when they're at home, they can take it home and work on this. And when they're writing, they'll think, Oh wait, I remember, I was going to write something like this. And I'd had a, it had that could in there again, or it had a wood in there. And oh, I can look in my little journal and find that. So I think this is a really nice activity to do with students. And it's not hard. And the one thing here in this case, Tom is study. I certainly would not put Tom if there was a student in the class named Tom. So I would never use examples that would identify a student or make a student feel like, oh, that was in my paper and I did it wrong. So. I think we have to be careful about that. But we can, you know, if errors are happening frequently, then there's something that we can kind of mix them up to get it so that it's anonymized. The other nice thing for those of us who are teaching in an English medium environment, to have our students go out and look for errors. So in this case, they are actively outside of class. So they could be doing this, you know, when they go to the store, when they're out wandering around, when they go to get a cup of coffee. And this is something that my students, you know, I teach in Flagstaff, Arizona. And That's not where I am right now. So it's not snowing a foot or two in Flagstaff if you were at the beginning of this. So my students would go out and they would come in and they would realize, wow, people are people who are making posters or signs in stores are making errors that I know about. And so this is really nice. And actually, this this tips is one that. It's very easy to find in many places where TIPS is marked as a possessive. And one of my more advanced students had found this error in a coffee shop and had said, does someone named Tip work here? And the person at the counter said, no, are you looking for someone named Tip? So they completely missed what the student was trying to point out and also resulted in quite a strange interaction between the student and the... the service provider. So that way you can then have students capture these. And, you know, now most everybody has a phone or something, or they can actually jot it down. And then you can have a wall in your classroom where you put the errors that were caught or found and brought in and the correction. And this also is a nice resource for students. And it helps students to realize, wow, I know something that is. I'm able to go out and provide correction to people that are supposedly fluent speakers of this language. And now we come to my absolute favorite. I think this is one of the most versatile activities, one of the most versatile games and the most engaging and also, I think, very meaningful. Because you're really reading and writing for a purpose. And it's a little bit of pressure. in this activity, but positive pressure. And so this activity generates language, and this language is then very easy to use for revising practice and for editing practice, both aspects. Revising when you're actually having to rewrite aspects and re-move text around to make it coherent and cohesive, and then editing where you're actually looking for, you know, fine-tuning mistakes, maybe subject-verb agreement or punctuation issues. And there's so, so many variations of this. So let's take a look at this game. So I like to call it right around the room. And the teacher begins by dictating the beginning of a story. So it's kind of one of those dictogloss activities where the students are having to write down exactly what they hear. So you could have a starter like, it was a dark and stormy night when, and you stop. Or I walked into the classroom and all of a sudden. So you build up a little bit of suspense. Obviously, you're going to repeat the beginning a couple times, making sure that the students are writing it down correctly. And you can adapt this. You can make it harder. You can use more complex or longer beginnings or very short beginnings. All the students write the beginning. Everybody has the same beginning. They don't put the three dots if you're putting. I like to do it as a dictogloss, so I don't write it on the board. But you might be you might want to be walking around checking that everybody's written it correctly. And then you tell the students, OK, start. You know, so that's a little bit of excitement with the game and the competition. And it's not really a competition, but it's a game. And so students write for about one minute and then. the teacher says switch and you, the students can either depending on your class would either move one seat over or pass their papers one person over. And so this is best done in a circle with, if you can move the chairs in your classroom. And if you have a large class, you might want to have two groups because this works well with about 10 or 15 students in a group. So if your class hopefully is not bigger than 15. But I know many of us teach classes with huge numbers. And this can be done even if you're in a room with fixed chairs. You just have to be very clear about who's passing to where. And so they switch their paper. So you're reading somebody else's paper. You're reading the beginning and you're reading what they've written. And then you have to keep writing. So you have to continue that story. So you're reading and then adding to that story. And at the beginning, the first few switches, a minute is probably about enough. Unless you have very advanced students, then you might need to allow a little more. But as the students pass the paper or move seats, you'll need to increase the time because they're needing to read, think a little bit, and then start writing. And once the students are back in their original seat or back with their original paper, they have a whole text that they didn't have to produce. Nobody had to write a lot, but every student in that class has a substantial amount of writing. for them to edit and revise. And I think one of the things that's really a hidden gem of this activity is that students are having to start writing right away. They're having to read. So they're reading, like I said, in introducing this activity, they're reading under pressure a little bit, but they're also having to write a little bit under pressure, but they're never having to write very much. And so it's nice that... You end up with something that you didn't write, and then you can talk. Maybe you start with a pair activity where students are looking at the two pages. They have a chance to read their paper, and then they might talk about what kind of revisions and changes they can make or should make. And this could be done at home or, you know, you could have students work on it in class and talk about some of the changes that they're doing from this activity to the text that they received. And it might mean that they're throwing out some sentences because they didn't really fit with the story or the gist didn't work. I was fortunate enough to be in a computer lab. And this is great activity. If you can do this in a computer lab and have students jumping from seat to seat. And then at the end, when they're back at their seat, they're on the computer. They have this as an electronic file. It's very easy to practice different editing tasks. You know, you might want to you might even talk about. using some of the features of bolding or underlining in your text. If you want to practice some of those things, have your students be more proficient with ways to increase the emphasis in a text. So I think you can see this is truly my very favorite activity. And then, you know, since we've been focusing on errors, it is nice to sometimes think as you're reading these papers, especially with advanced students, more advanced students. You get longer texts. You start seeing some errors. And so it's nice if you can kind of before some assignment happens, you know, if you're leading up to an assignment or if you've been doing multiple drafts with which you would be doing with high intermediate or advanced students, you can actually make your little set of common mistakes that students make. And you never want to give more than four or six. And this doesn't mean that every student's making this, but you've just noticed enough of these as you've been reading some of the first drafts. You've noticed this, so you make a little list. And then make a text that is a composite and have students go in and edit it. You know, get that practice editing, because that really does transfer to help students be more effective in... reading their own papers. And it's so hard. I mean, when we're, you know, for anyone, I think all of us, no matter how proficient a writer you become, it's really hard to read and edit your own papers, because or your own writing, because well, first of all, you get attached to some of those sentences. It's like, oh, you know, there's no way I could have said this any better. And also, you sometimes because you're reading and you're reading fluently, you don't see the error. So then you get the practice editing. So in wrapping up, I think, you know, we'll look back at our title. And I hope that we all ended up with the idea that grammar is more than just fun and games. It's very important. And I hope that just as this girl is walking away with her bag of fruit, I hope that you have some grammar ideas and games that you can maybe adapt. and use for your classrooms. And I'm really grateful that you've taken time out of your very busy days to enjoy our Grammar Day celebration. And I'm happy to answer any questions. And I think we have. plenty of time for questions. So, and I'll leave this, if you're interested, these websites will show you the links to these, this series of books that I think have very nice research-informed and research-informed information, like the example of the common regular and irregular verbs in past tense. And so I'd like to wrap it up there and open the floor up to you to ask questions.

But I think in... Every case, you should be able to apply it with whatever you're using. But I think I'm biased, but I think these are really good resources. So like any good teacher, we're going to talk about the agenda a little bit.

We're going to have a couple parts in this presentation. We'll have a quick look at the title. We're going to ask the question, are games effective for grammar instruction?

We're going to look at four examples of games or activities that are very engaging for students. And then we'll wrap up and leave plenty of time for questions. So a quick look at our title.

I think our title kind of has two meanings or two senses. You know, grammar, not just fun and games or grammar, not just fun and games. I can't really do the prosody correctly to get it. But I think that the first one, first meaning that.

could have is that grammar is not fun. And I mean, given that we're all gathered here today on Grammar Day, I would imagine that most of us think grammar is fun. But sometimes our students don't think that. So hopefully in this presentation, we'll see how we can maybe get some students who are maybe not thinking grammar is fun, but encouraging them to see how it can be fun. And the other meaning of the title, The other meaning that I think the title could have is that grammar is more than just fun and games.

It's important. So let's see where we end up at the end of this webinar. So I think the first question, are games effective for grammar instruction?

I think that's a really important question to ask ourselves and to also think about just in general when we're teaching. Why are we choosing to teach what we're teaching? And why are we choosing to teach it in the way we're teaching it?

So I think those are questions that are always good to ask ourselves before we plan our lesson. And then also afterwards, we can think, was that effective? You know, were the students engaged? Where was the practice I did contextualized and meaningful?

So I think that games can be very effective. If they provide practice for the target form or the structure in context, just randomly reciting grammar rules or randomly going through a chart, I don't think is very effective because we're not emphasizing the structure in context. And granted, we need to practice in context in a controlled manner and then move to more open ended.

But the context is important. And I'm not saying grammar charts aren't important. They're a nice resource for us and for our students.

But it's not that much fun to say, I am, you are, he is. So grammar can also, the games can be very effective if the practice is engaging. And I think that putting students in teams or having individuals competing in a nice environment, not in a cutthroat environment.

But. competing for points or some type of an acknowledgement or a certificate or an award. I think those can be helpful in making grammar games and any kind of vocabulary games, any kind of practice that needs to be done engaging. So we're going to take a look at some examples of games, of grammar games, and we're going to look at four different games, four different activity games. So we'll take a quick look at Kahoot.

We'll look at a game that I'm calling tense competition. Then we'll look at two parts of a game, grammar inside and outside of the classroom, and right around the room. The last one is my very favorite. So how many of you, maybe you can put this in the chat, how many of you use Kahoot or know about Kahoot? Lots of you.

Okay, good. Yeah. And I think Kahoot is really great.

And, you know, we can use it in lots of different ways. And We there's been some research in 2020, not 1920. In 2020, Wang and Tahir did a major study looking at the effectiveness of Kahoot. And they surveyed 93 published research articles.

So these were genuine research articles vetted by peer review. And there were lots of different types of studies. There were case studies where they look specifically at a smaller section.

There were large experiments. And in all of these, they found that using Kahoot has a positive effect on learning performance, meaning that your students are going to be learning more effectively. It also improved classroom dynamics, student attitude, and lowered anxiety.

So those are all great things. And I'd like to say, you know, Kahoot is... Great. It's a lot of fun.

I think we can also assume that I'm going to make the extension that this research on Kahoot, where it's done in an engaging way, and it is sort of a competition with Kahoot. And sometimes we're in teams and sometimes we're competing individually. I think that we can extend this to say that using games effectively in our classroom would also have these positive effects on learning and also lowering anxiety.

And for those of you who... have used Kahoot! many times you have to make your own material, but Grammar and Beyond actually has material already developed.

So we'll take a little quick look at the material, some of the material that's available for you, even if you're not using Grammar and Beyond. So this is what Kahoot! looks like in a unit that's already developed.

You can see the questions are shown here. You can also preview the questions. So you know what the right answer is in case you're unsure. You can assign this to students if you're actually in Kahoot with Grammar and Beyond. And then this is what it can look like.

It often focuses on errors that are typical that students make. And I think when we read the gap fill, like I'm not so tired after class this way, you can almost hear your students' voices. But the one that I like the best is this one, I amn't, because that's just a really quirky thing about English, the way we contract am not. We don't do it that way.

So we can't say I'm not. So you can't say I amn't. You have to say I'm not. So I think that's really useful that this is informed by by research as to what the what the examples are. And then we see there's the correct one.

And you can see your answer streak and you can see your points. So I think this is a nice example of a way that an app can be used to encourage gaming and can be practiced. You could assign it to students to do at home or you can actually do it as competitions in your class. So now we'll look at the second game. I call it a tense game and it's kind of a play on words.

I like to play with words. And here we have a chart and we're looking at past tense and we're showing how past tense with regular verbs and past tense with irregular verbs. We go through the chart and then down here we see data from the real world. And this is some a feature that's in every unit of grammar and beyond.

And it shows from research these verbs like work, start, live are very common, regular, simple past tense verbs. And below that, we see go and come and take. These are the most frequent irregular simple verbs that are occurring in simple past. So we know we want to practice those verbs. We know that they're really important.

And so how can we practice this in a controlled manner, starting out at first to be very controlled? So here we have a gap fill activity. And, you know, we could just sit down and have students do that in class. That would be something, but it wouldn't be very engaging.

We could have them do it for homework and come in and check that. But it might be more fun if we actually took the reading and we could project it on the board or we could write some of the examples on the board. We can, you know, if we do it as a PowerPoint, we can blow it up. If your school has Presentation Plus, you can project it.

And then you could put students in numbered teams. Each team would have a number. Excuse me. then you could call out a number and the team would run up and write the answer in the gap fill activity.

This would be a little bit more engaging or every student. So if you have you know, there is actually in this actual exercise, I'm only showing you 14 of the gaps, but they're actually 25 in that reading that you saw. And you could actually as students come in, just be handing them numbers, you know, hand out random numbers and then call a number out and the student has to run up and fill it. So it.

would mean that maybe number 10 is getting filled out before number nine, and then you can go through and read the reading. The other thing that I want to point out is that unlike many times when we have practice, this actually turns into a coherent text. So the students aren't just jumping from one topic to another, you know, line one might be about, sometimes we have like, you know, my friends met in middle school. I want to eat a peanut butter sandwich when I get home.

My dog stayed with my neighbors. All these random things. It's not cohesive.

Whereas this way, we're actually practicing language in a meaningful context. We're actually creating a story by putting these verbs in. So these next two activities are, I think, really helpful. because it's really focused on the students and the students in your class. So I think I sometimes call this investigators inside the classroom.

Sometimes I call it detectives. I don't know. I felt when I was working on this, the detectives sounded funny. So, or maybe odd.

So I made it investigators. And so. What you want to do in this is, you know, you're getting writing, you're hearing your students speaking, you're knowing, excuse me, you know what your students are struggling with, you know what's hard for them. And so I like to pick one or two things that I've noticed that they're struggling with and put it on the board.

So this is an example from a fifth grade class that I was working with. They had trouble with modals, knowing that you didn't have to inflect. verb after that. So you'd see yesterday I could finish all my homework and Tom is study. So there's a time issue in both of these past tense and also ongoing.

So students come in, you have this on the board before the students arrive, and then they come in. And they look at the board. They know, come in, look at the board. They write the sentence with the error and they fix it.

So they each student individually fixes each of these two sentences in this example. And then they they talk. We talk about this as a class just at the beginning. How did you fix it?

How did you fix it? And this is a nice way to talk about what's wrong, to have students work individually, but then hear how other people fix. fix the error and in some cases not necessarily in these um you could there are many different ways to fix it so um it's good to talk about that and to see how changing how you fix it changes the language and it's also um much more effective if students have a little journal and they do this in the journal and i think it's also good because then they're getting practice writing especially in this case, these were fifth graders. And also then they have this journal and they have these incorrect and then correct corrected sentences.

And this serves as a resource. So when they're writing, they can have this on their desk and, or when they're at home, they can take it home and work on this. And when they're writing, they'll think, Oh wait, I remember, I was going to write something like this.

And I'd had a, it had that could in there again, or it had a wood in there. And oh, I can look in my little journal and find that. So I think this is a really nice activity to do with students. And it's not hard. And the one thing here in this case, Tom is study.

I certainly would not put Tom if there was a student in the class named Tom. So I would never use examples that would identify a student or make a student feel like, oh, that was in my paper and I did it wrong. So.

I think we have to be careful about that. But we can, you know, if errors are happening frequently, then there's something that we can kind of mix them up to get it so that it's anonymized. The other nice thing for those of us who are teaching in an English medium environment, to have our students go out and look for errors.

So in this case, they are actively outside of class. So they could be doing this, you know, when they go to the store, when they're out wandering around, when they go to get a cup of coffee. And this is something that my students, you know, I teach in Flagstaff, Arizona.

And That's not where I am right now. So it's not snowing a foot or two in Flagstaff if you were at the beginning of this. So my students would go out and they would come in and they would realize, wow, people are people who are making posters or signs in stores are making errors that I know about.

And so this is really nice. And actually, this this tips is one that. It's very easy to find in many places where TIPS is marked as a possessive. And one of my more advanced students had found this error in a coffee shop and had said, does someone named Tip work here?

And the person at the counter said, no, are you looking for someone named Tip? So they completely missed what the student was trying to point out and also resulted in quite a strange interaction between the student and the... the service provider.

So that way you can then have students capture these. And, you know, now most everybody has a phone or something, or they can actually jot it down. And then you can have a wall in your classroom where you put the errors that were caught or found and brought in and the correction.

And this also is a nice resource for students. And it helps students to realize, wow, I know something that is. I'm able to go out and provide correction to people that are supposedly fluent speakers of this language. And now we come to my absolute favorite. I think this is one of the most versatile activities, one of the most versatile games and the most engaging and also, I think, very meaningful.

Because you're really reading and writing for a purpose. And it's a little bit of pressure. in this activity, but positive pressure. And so this activity generates language, and this language is then very easy to use for revising practice and for editing practice, both aspects.

Revising when you're actually having to rewrite aspects and re-move text around to make it coherent and cohesive, and then editing where you're actually looking for, you know, fine-tuning mistakes, maybe subject-verb agreement or punctuation issues. And there's so, so many variations of this. So let's take a look at this game. So I like to call it right around the room. And the teacher begins by dictating the beginning of a story.

So it's kind of one of those dictogloss activities where the students are having to write down exactly what they hear. So you could have a starter like, it was a dark and stormy night when, and you stop. Or I walked into the classroom and all of a sudden.

So you build up a little bit of suspense. Obviously, you're going to repeat the beginning a couple times, making sure that the students are writing it down correctly. And you can adapt this. You can make it harder.

You can use more complex or longer beginnings or very short beginnings. All the students write the beginning. Everybody has the same beginning. They don't put the three dots if you're putting. I like to do it as a dictogloss, so I don't write it on the board.

But you might be you might want to be walking around checking that everybody's written it correctly. And then you tell the students, OK, start. You know, so that's a little bit of excitement with the game and the competition.

And it's not really a competition, but it's a game. And so students write for about one minute and then. the teacher says switch and you, the students can either depending on your class would either move one seat over or pass their papers one person over. And so this is best done in a circle with, if you can move the chairs in your classroom. And if you have a large class, you might want to have two groups because this works well with about 10 or 15 students in a group.

So if your class hopefully is not bigger than 15. But I know many of us teach classes with huge numbers. And this can be done even if you're in a room with fixed chairs. You just have to be very clear about who's passing to where.

And so they switch their paper. So you're reading somebody else's paper. You're reading the beginning and you're reading what they've written. And then you have to keep writing. So you have to continue that story.

So you're reading and then adding to that story. And at the beginning, the first few switches, a minute is probably about enough. Unless you have very advanced students, then you might need to allow a little more.

But as the students pass the paper or move seats, you'll need to increase the time because they're needing to read, think a little bit, and then start writing. And once the students are back in their original seat or back with their original paper, they have a whole text that they didn't have to produce. Nobody had to write a lot, but every student in that class has a substantial amount of writing. for them to edit and revise.

And I think one of the things that's really a hidden gem of this activity is that students are having to start writing right away. They're having to read. So they're reading, like I said, in introducing this activity, they're reading under pressure a little bit, but they're also having to write a little bit under pressure, but they're never having to write very much. And so it's nice that... You end up with something that you didn't write, and then you can talk.

Maybe you start with a pair activity where students are looking at the two pages. They have a chance to read their paper, and then they might talk about what kind of revisions and changes they can make or should make. And this could be done at home or, you know, you could have students work on it in class and talk about some of the changes that they're doing from this activity to the text that they received. And it might mean that they're throwing out some sentences because they didn't really fit with the story or the gist didn't work. I was fortunate enough to be in a computer lab.

And this is great activity. If you can do this in a computer lab and have students jumping from seat to seat. And then at the end, when they're back at their seat, they're on the computer. They have this as an electronic file.

It's very easy to practice different editing tasks. You know, you might want to you might even talk about. using some of the features of bolding or underlining in your text.

If you want to practice some of those things, have your students be more proficient with ways to increase the emphasis in a text. So I think you can see this is truly my very favorite activity. And then, you know, since we've been focusing on errors, it is nice to sometimes think as you're reading these papers, especially with advanced students, more advanced students.

You get longer texts. You start seeing some errors. And so it's nice if you can kind of before some assignment happens, you know, if you're leading up to an assignment or if you've been doing multiple drafts with which you would be doing with high intermediate or advanced students, you can actually make your little set of common mistakes that students make.

And you never want to give more than four or six. And this doesn't mean that every student's making this, but you've just noticed enough of these as you've been reading some of the first drafts. You've noticed this, so you make a little list. And then make a text that is a composite and have students go in and edit it.

You know, get that practice editing, because that really does transfer to help students be more effective in... reading their own papers. And it's so hard. I mean, when we're, you know, for anyone, I think all of us, no matter how proficient a writer you become, it's really hard to read and edit your own papers, because or your own writing, because well, first of all, you get attached to some of those sentences.

It's like, oh, you know, there's no way I could have said this any better. And also, you sometimes because you're reading and you're reading fluently, you don't see the error. So then you get the practice editing. So in wrapping up, I think, you know, we'll look back at our title. And I hope that we all ended up with the idea that grammar is more than just fun and games.

It's very important. And I hope that just as this girl is walking away with her bag of fruit, I hope that you have some grammar ideas and games that you can maybe adapt. and use for your classrooms.

And I'm really grateful that you've taken time out of your very busy days to enjoy our Grammar Day celebration. And I'm happy to answer any questions. And I think we have.

plenty of time for questions. So, and I'll leave this, if you're interested, these websites will show you the links to these, this series of books that I think have very nice research-informed and research-informed information, like the example of the common regular and irregular verbs in past tense. And so I'd like to wrap it up there and open the floor up to you to ask questions.

Transcript for:Engaging Grammar Instruction Through Games

Transcript for:
Engaging Grammar Instruction Through Games