Telephone Game


 Telephone game

Fodor Balázs

Part 1: The Game

Level & Learning Outcomes

The level of the game is at the B1-B2 level, making it an upper-intermediate activity. This is mainly due to the focus on the practise and production of reported speech.

Materials needed

No particular materials are needed.

Object of Game

Proper production of reported speech and transforming indirect sentences back to direct ones.

Rules of Play

Preferably the students are organized in orderly rows.

A student on the end of the row produces a direct sentence, which relates to an action they did that day. (e.g.: I'm wearing my favourite pair of shoes today.) This sentence is whispered to their partner next to them.

The student next to them has to transform this sentence to reported speech, which is then whispered to their partner on the other side (3rd student in this case).

The third student has to transform the indirect sentence back to a direct one, which is then again, whispered to the next student in line.

Repeat until all students in the row have transmitted a message.

Part 2: Reflection

This is a game I held in a 10th grade class. The activity can be an efficient way to practise the production and the general rules of reported speech. It also invites the students to produce such sentences in speech.

The game does not have any sorts of scoring system. Now, this might be controversial, but it can also reduce the stress, especially if the production is proving difficult for the students.

During the activity, I noticed some shortcomings related to this task. First things first, the lack of scoring does reduce competition, eliminating the competitive drive to perform during the task. However, as I have mentioned previously, the task might prove difficult

otherwise. To add, the game does require the students being organized in orderly rows, it wouldn't work in other types of organization, aside from maybe horseshoe.

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