Two or more teams, cards spread out on the table. One contestant from each team, teacher calls a card, first student to grab that card gets to keep it. The teacher can add a production task to this round, by requiring that the winner, for example, make a sentence with the card that he has just taken. In its most basic form the contestant with the most cards is the winner. However, this can be expanded to teams in where each team sends one contestant and the members rotate through, taking turns. Looking carefully at the game, there are several variables that come into play. First, there is the visual recognition of the cards. Before the players even hear a sound, they are scanning the cards to identify what cards are there and where they are. In the area of visual recognition difficulty increases for the players in conditions including:
More cards on the table
Less recognition of the content of the cards (i.e. harder words)
More cognitive load between the aural prompt and the visual content (i.e. have to find the opposite)
In the area of aural recognition, difficulty increases with:
the length of the aural prompt
the speed of the prompt
any distracters included
It is important to note that these factors change as the number of cards on the table decreases.
The teacher can thus control a number of factors that make the game easy or difficult, thus giving her the ability to control the learning environment very precisely – down to the level of being able to effectively focus on the needs of individual students. Before the game starts, she chooses the content of the cards and the number of teams (contestants), in addition to the cognitive load between the aural prompt and the visual content. However, during the game she controls the number of cards on the table (by holding some back and adding them later if needed), the length and speed of the aural prompt, and the presence of distracters. In addition she can judiciously choose to call cards close to or far from individual students, and she can assign an otetsuki punishment to contestants who touch the wrong card (such as making a sentence with the word). Students, on the other hand, are motivated to be faster in order to win the current card, and be consistent in order to win more cards. Production goals are achieved in the production task for the winner and the otetsuki punishment.
It is very important to see how these production tasks interact with the main task of the game. Production tasks do not generally come with any motivation, especially if they are simply done in drills, and lower level learners often try to avoid them. However, if they are part of the game, especially if they are part of winning, then this negative is often washed out. In a sense, the game creates a context for producing language, even if it is not strictly communicative, however the task could be constructed so that there was some sort of dialog. The key here is not creating a conversation, but getting students to think on a level before that, whether it be vocabulary or grammatical constructions.
The teacher can thus observe two main phenomena in this game:
Recognition – in the speed of taking the card
Accuracy – in the production task