“Are your students there to have fun, or are they there to learn?”
I’ve heard this criticism leveled against TEFL games more than once, and in addition to my post on Is TEFL Just Entertainment, would like to have another shot at countering it. The fact is, learning and having fun are not mutually exclusive, and I suspect there is a great deal of research showing that having fun, or incorporating appropriate games, is connected to positive learning results. (See my Top 10 TEFL Games for some of my own suggestions).
It’s just common sense to me that people are more receptive to new content when they are engaged and enjoying themselves…rather than when they are serious, somber and quite likely nervous. There are games that waste time and teachers who waste time, and I’m not about to stand up for these, but in my experience it is a mistake to overestimate the earnestness of students by taking an approach which hinges on some altruistic love of knowledge. Even people studying fields which they have actively chosen don’t always want to learn for the sake of learning…they want to learn to get their degree or pass the course. I aced both introductory and symbolic logic as well as couple of courses in statistics – and I’m don’t take myself too seriously to say that I think we’d all have been better off had we had a few board races, played pictionary, or thrown a beanbag around to learn each others’ names.
Of course – you need to take into account your students’ expectations and wishes, and not compel them to participate in activities they find useless or patronizing. But to some extent they take their lead from you, and I think it’s not correct to assume that something which aims to be enjoyable is necessarily the opposite of learning.
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Quite so. Rarely a class goes by when I don\’t use at least one game of some sort. There are two dangers though:
1) The game will only have to stop when it stops being fun, so the language point(s) can easily get lost
2) Some students (e.g. teenagers sensitive about not being treated as kids, some business men, many Spanish students) will believe that games are not what they want to do and so the postive short term motivation boost will be more than cancelled out by their overall negative impressions of course (I can\’t be learning anything, we only play games all the time)
There are cures to both of these, but this comment is already too long
TEFLtastic blog- Teaching all ove the place
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase
Yes, good points. I won’t comment on teenagers, but I would concur that especially in an in-company setting, the wrong “activity” (it’s never called a game then!) can be a mistake. I find that being clear about the purpose helps, but there are times when it just won’t work.
And, hey, I don’t know if you’ve seen the quantity of posts I make, but there is no such thing as a “too long” comment at the tefl logue!
Absolutely re: the statement that learning can be fun. I am the local token serious (aka boring) teacher, but at the insistence of student teachers, I have made an effort to integrate more “activities.” And truth is, I am beginning to admit their usefulness – beyond just making class fun. In fact, TESOL currently has a language games book in the works.
Thanks for your comment. It’s cool that you are open to incorporating new things into your teaching (and I’m sure you’re not boring…):)
It’s good to hear about the book of language games in progress. It’s nice to have a wide variety of resources to choose from.
I agree. Another point is that there’s actually research showing that “word awareness” is linked to general language achievement, and can be developed through logology, or wordplay. There are a few links to theory-based papers included in this handout that my MATESOL classmate and I did for a conference:
http://www.sharedwing.net/tesol/wordgames.pdf
(sorry, PDF only at this point).
Thanks Clarissa and sorry it took me so long to reply…something weird happens when I open pdf’s sometimes, so I put it off! (Don’t worry, this one was fine!)
I’d encourage others to check out this handout she made – in addition to the links to articles, there is a nice list of commercial and free word games…some I had not heard of before and will look into. Very cool!
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