The Language Games And We

Irina Apoyan elucidates the foreign language teachers' workshop on December 24.

On December 24 we had a very interesting, effective and lively workshop in the High School reading hall. The workshop was conducted by Yura Ganjalyan, the participants were the foreign language teachers, and the theme of the workshop was “The language Games”. We all imagined as if we were students and joined in the interactive language games. Mr Yura suggested games which develop both the oral speech and imagination. For example, “The Snowball”: one of the learners forms a sentence, the next student repeats the first sentence and forms another sentence which is the logical continuation of the first sentence. The third student forms his own sentence after repeating the first two sentences. In the result of this game a new story is created with all the students taking part.

When playing the game “Live Dictionary” the class is divided into several groups and the leaders of the groups are chosen. The teacher gives the leaders sheets of paper with some words written on them. The leaders are to give explanations of the words in English, and their team members try to guess the words.

Continuing sentences optimistically and pessimistically was another interesting and fun game. While playing language games the teacher doesn’t correct grammar mistakes made by the students. The key objective of the language games is a real communication in close to life situations.

All these games can be used during the January project based educational camp. Let me finish this blog entry with the style of the last in turn game mentioned above: fortunately, it was a very effective seminar but unfortunately, it didn’t last long.