Language Learning Activities: Games, Stories, Routines

Posted on Mar 28, 2025 in Other civil servant exams

Characteristics and Functions of Games

Key Theories and Concepts

  • Vygotsky: The context of play creates zones of proximal development for the child.
  • Langran and Purcell: Language game – a tool to create a situation in the classroom which provides learners with opportunities for using the target language.
  • Thornbury (1995?): Distinguished between competitive games and cooperative games.
  • Hadfield (1998): Categorized games as cooperative, competitive, and individualistic.
  • Lengeling and Malarcher (1997): Identified benefits across different areas:
    • Affective Area: Lowers affective filter (Krashen), encourages creativity (Tyson), promotes communication (Tyson), motivates (Moon), fun (Philips).
    • Cognitive Area: Reinforces learning (McCallum), reviews material (McCallum), focuses on grammar (McCallum).
    • Class Dynamics Area: Student-centered (Crookall), teacher acts only as facilitator (Crookall), builds cohesion (Cook), fosters whole class participation (McCallum), promotes healthy competition (McCallum).
    • Adaptability Area: Easily adjusted for age (McCallum), utilizes all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, or listening) (McCallum), requires minimum preparation (McCallum).

Selecting and Using Games

Insights from Lewis, Bedson, and Hong:

  1. Think ahead.
  2. Games are best set up by demonstration.
  3. It’s very important not to play a game for too long.
  4. Distinguish noise from chaos.

Game Types

Based on Bedson, Gordon, and Mourado’s classification:

  • Movement games
  • Card games
  • Board games
  • Dice games
  • Drawing games
  • Guessing games
  • Role-play games
  • Singing and chatting games
  • Team games
  • Word games

Recent Innovations in Games

Focus on ICT (Information and Communication Technologies).

  • Mercer (2014): Emphasized the need to be critically reflective when choosing an app or software and consider possibilities.

General Characteristics of Effective Game-Based Learning:

  • Active involvement of the children
  • Self-motivation
  • Exposure to different situations
  • Children’s high levels of engagement

Storytelling in Language Learning

  • Barreras: Storytelling is an ideal introduction to foreign languages as stories provide a familiar context for the child.
  • Grey (in Gonzalez y Querol): Highlights include:
    • Literature and culture are interrelated.
    • A tool to introduce vocabulary.
    • Incorporates playfulness.
    • Requires appropriate selection.
  • Goshn: Benefits include motivation, offering learners a sense and a context, learning of the language and its usage, although adaptation may be needed.

Understanding Classroom Routines

A routine is the usual series of things that you do at a particular time or the practice of regularly doing things in a fixed order.

Frameworks and Concepts

  • Read’s C-Wheel: Context, Connections, Coherence, Challenge, Curiosity, Care, Community, Creativity.
  • Vygotsky’s ZPD: Zone of Proximal Development.

Benefits of Routines

  • Acquire basic functional concepts.
  • Use communicative methodology.
  • Students construct their knowledge.
  • Being systematic.
  • Help transfer of learning.
  • Lead to significant emotional context.
  • Children like repetition.
  • Advantage of authentic material.
  • Help to establish rules and cooperate in the development of different aspects.

Linguistic Expressions in Early Learning

  • Personal Functions: Say their name, age, birth date; express self-esteem, happiness, boredom, anger, refusal.
  • Interpersonal Functions: Face-to-face interaction, speaking to someone, speaking on the telephone, greeting, congratulations.
  • Strategic-Referential Functions: Giving instructions or advice, asking for permissions, warning.
  • Reference Functions: Referring to the time of day, season, simple events, things.
  • Poetic-Imaginative Functions: Using rhythm, poetic expressions.
  • Metalinguistic Functions: Problem resolution, asking for more examples in the classroom.

Read’s (2007) R’s for Classroom Management

  • Relationships
  • Rules
  • Routines
  • Rights
  • Responsibilities
  • Respect
  • Rewards

Designing Songs for Language Learning

7 Key Features:

  1. Length
  2. Level
  3. Repetition
  4. Content
  5. Relevance
  6. Actions
  7. Context
  8. Catchiness

Pronunciation Considerations

Comparing L1 and L2 sounds:

  1. The existence of a given sound in the target language but not the native language.
  2. Sounds which have the same phonetic features in both languages but differ in their distribution.
  3. Similar sounds in two languages which differ only slightly in their phonetic features.
  4. Sounds that have the same qualities in both languages.