This document is intended to be a guide to thinking about interactions in the language classroom rather than just a simple list of games. We believe that activities are essential parts of language pedagogy and games illustrate many of the factors involved in each individual learner's motivation and realizations.
For these reasons, this document is made up of three main parts: the Concept, Basic Games, and Variations. In the first part we will detail some of the most important decisions entailed in choosing and implementing games, first from basic principles. In the second part, we will use several specific examples to illustrate the implementation process. The third part gives examples of possible variations on the basic games, with careful attention paid to the processes involved in coming up with these variations. Most of these games are vocabulary learning games for children aged 5-15, to be played with cards, often in conjunction with other toys, and most work best with teams of 5-8 students. However, the decision-making processes and variations introduced will illustrate how to adapt them for other types of students in different numbers and settings.
Throughout this document we also hope that it will become apparent that these decision-making processes do not just apply to games, but classroom activities in general. We believe that games are a good lens through which it is possible to analyze how teachers create lessons and curricula. The key skill which we advocate for teachers is the ability to adapt a given activity the specific circumstances and needs of a classroom. Therefore, our basic question is: How do activities function in a classroom? This can be broken down into several constituent questions:
What are the students doing?
Why are they doing it?
What are they learning?
What can the teacher assess?
What variables does the teacher control in the implementation of the activity?
To begin, if we compare games to more traditional academic classroom activities, such as a worksheet, one of the main differences is that the game includes the possibility of winning. Even if the game and the worksheet cover the same linguistic concept, students usually enjoy winning more than just completing the work they are assigned. This concept is very important in classroom management: researchers and teachers often discuss the motivation for learning a language in terms of the actual outcome of being able to understand and speak that language, and the identity attained through that ability. However, while such an overarching motivation may be one of the factors in students' participation, in the day to day operation of a course, or even a classroom, those eventual goals may be somewhat less immediate. Participation in contextualized dialogs is the ideal for language learning, but this is not always possible, even for those living in a country where the target language is spoken. Smaller tasks, such as isolated sentences, also give students experience with the process of constructing speech – arguably a more immediate need for many of the "false beginners" that populate the ESL classrooms of the world. Further, utilizing motivations other than the eventual goal of fluency is often a more productive way to engage students on a day to day basis. Indeed, it is also possible to argue that relying on the eventual goal of fluency invites the possibility that lower level students will feel overwhelmed or frustrated with their lack of progress. Therefore, measures of success on a daily level, however small and tangential, play an important role in preventing struggling students from giving up.