Engaging ESL revision: Game suggestions from our Chasing Time English series
By Mia Tarau - Materials Writer
Language learning is one of the most wonderful journeys anyone could engage in, despite the challenges that come with the two often-present additional pressures in the ESL classroom: immigration and/or university entrance thresholds. Understanding the need for effective revision is crucial both for language teachers and the learners themselves, given the high-stakes tests and assessment items that come at the end of teaching blocks or teaching units. Our Chasing Time English team of language teachers have kept this in mind and have been designing a variety of fun revision tasks to be used either at the end of each episode, or as a wrap-up for each of our complete language teaching/learning series. Below are three ideas that you could use to enrich the revision repertoire in your courses, drawing inspiration from some of the activities that we incorporated into our Skippers Pass and The Last Hustle ESL learning packages.
1. Crossword puzzles for vocabulary items
A great tool for reviewing new vocabulary is the humble crossword puzzle. There are a host of online crossword puzzle makers that can be used to create these, but it is also very simple to put one together in any word processing programme, or even by hand (for all creatives in the teaching profession – this idea is for you!). Crossword puzzles are easily customisable and can be designed to cover a range of skills, the simplest being recognising vocabulary items (words, phrasal verbs) based on their definitions. These are handy for both weekly and end-of-unit or end-of-course revision.
Bonus: Crossword puzzles for vocabulary revision work great as a group activity (these are a lot more fun!): simply print them out or draw them on giant sheets of paper, and make it a group competition. A prize for the winning team is always a great idea to stimulate systematic learning and engaging group collaboration throughout the course!
2. Crossword puzzles with gap fill clues for listening practice
These are a new addition to our Chasing Time English learning packages. We based the listening tasks on the contents of each episode, but teachers can easily record and use their own sample sentences that would incorporate the relevant vocabulary for each learning unit. A phone is all you need! Adding the crossword dimension to the gap fill task has the added benefit of guiding the students in identifying their own spelling errors before they receive the solution. This type of crossword puzzle works well in terms of giving the students a chance to recall what each episode (or unit) was about, while also reviewing all the new vocabulary they learned in said episode/unit.
Our suggestion: Crossword puzzles for listening practice work best used as individual worksheets.
3. Board games for end-of-course revision
These are my absolute favourites: I have been creating a different one for every single one of our series since 2018. I love how versatile these can be – all it takes is some creativity. You can base these on existing board games, as I did for The Last Hustle, or you can create your very own. For our latest series, The Last Hustle, I created a customised scrabble end-of-course vocab revision game, in keeping with the overall theme of our series. I cannot give away too many details on this, but you can find out more about our courses on our website, where you can join and get access to all of our teaching materials: https://chasingtimeenglish.com/teachers
You can also find a simple ‘roll the dice’ end-of-course revision board game in our Skippers Pass resource package, available through the Chasing Time English TV subscription by visiting https://chasingtimeenglish.vhx.tv/
We hope that you have found some revision inspiration in today’s blog post!
Now it is our turn to hear from you: what are your top 3 suggestions for most effective revision activities?