 |
The
Hot Seat game is the most effective game ever for
producing natural, emergent language in the classroom.
|
|
|
HOW
TO PLAY |
|
|
Basic
Way |
|
|
|
1 |
A student sits on a
chair - the Hot Seat - back to the screen or board and
must not turn around. |
|
2 |
The class has to
explain to the the team what the word is, without
mentioning it. |
|
3 |
The game ends when
the student guesses the word. |
|
|
|
Variants and House Rules |
|
|
|
1 |
Two students sit back
to the board and their teams must explain the word. This
can be noisy! |
|
2 |
One student in the
Hot Seat and just one explaining. Time them. The pair
with the best time wins. |
|
3 |
20 Questions. The
person in the Hot Seat can ask 20 questions to guess the
word. |
|
4 |
Ask your class to
make up some house rules for the game. |
|
|
|
WHY
THIS GAME IS SO EFFECTIVE |
|
|
Ostensibly, this is a
vocab game but actually it is the most effective way I
know of getting students to speak in a
spontaneous way. The act of explaining gets them using
question forms, exclamations and a whole series of
authentic speech acts in a spontaneous and natural way.
|
|
|
For the first few
goes, the teacher can do the explaining and you will see
how the students pick up the language they need for the
game and start using it for themselves! |
