Word Battle (Listening & C1 Vocabulary)

 

Word Battle

Zoltán Radics


Part 1: The Game

Level & Learning Outcomes

The aim of this game is to improve C1 level students’ (who can be either High School students preparing for their mature exams or adult learners trying to improve their language) lexical knowledge of different topics.

Materials needed 

  • boardmarker or chalk

Object of Game

To get the most points by correctly guessing the given word.


Rules of Play

  1. Divide group into three or four teams.

  2. A group chooses a person to come out

  3. The chosen person sits down in a chair facing toward his/her team and away from the board

  4. The team chooses a topic from a given list (in this case, there are five topics to choose from)

  5. The teacher chooses a word from his/her pre-written list in the given topics and writes that word on the board and starts a 1-minute timer

  6. The team will try to explain the meaning of the word to their team member without saying the exact word


Scorekeeping

Each correctly guessed word counts as 1 point and each team will get one turn in a round. The rounds of the game are determined by the teacher. (3-5 rounds is ideal) The team with the most points at the end of the final round will win.

Part 2: Reflection


Given the fact that this is not an original game and have been used by several other language teachers, the actual process of making the game was found to be rather simple for me. Our team knew that we need to gather different words for our given topics but we had to keep in mind the chosen level for our game as well. The used words however, does not necessarily had to be at C1 level because even a simple looking word like “(political) party” can be difficult to explain. Another rule that we had to work around was the time management because each team got 1 minute for their round, the words couldn’t be too long or too short and each category had to contain “easy” and “hard” words to guess so it wouldn’t be unfair.

This game facilitates several different listening subskills. For example, the person who has to guess the word needs to understand the vocabulary of the chosen topic and he or she has to make inferences from the explanations of his/her team and recognize the literal meaning of the word. The person also needs to draw a conclusion from the given explanation and identify the word. Naturally, the members of the teams need understanding of the vocabulary and the literal meaning of the given word as well but they also need to determine a purpose for their explanation because even though they can see the word written on the board, they have to cooperate with each other and come up with an explanation that is the easiest to comprehend for their team member which means that they need to know the purpose of their explanation and the task itself in order to be as successful as possible.

After we have presented our game, I have found that this can be used with basically every skill level and topic but the words need to be as fair and understandable as possible. There were multiple instances where several people didn’t know what the word meant which means that they wouldn’t be able to explain or guess them. However, I would only use this game as a revision of the learnt vocabulary, so I think that this issue wouldn’t come up in an actual classroom but I do think that we should have used more common words for this task. I do not think that there was any other issue with our game because the rules were simple and most of the participants have already played a game like this but we could have shared the used words beforehand so our peers could look up words that were unfamiliar. I also think that the topic should have been determined by random chance because the participants could easily avoid words that they weren’t familiar with.


Part 3 Appendices



Appendix A: Word List


Science fiction:

  • alien

  • jedi

  • railgun

  • clone

  • research

  • gravity

  • teleportation

History:

  • war

  • peace

  • castle

  • flag

  • coin

  • knight

  • Roman Empire

  • sword

  • gladiator


Politics:

  • liberal 

  • conservative

  • party

  • autocracy

  • democracy

  • tory

  • economy

Famous people:

  • Trump

  • Biden

  • Rihanna

  • Lady Gaga

  • Elon Musk

  • Keanu Reaves

  • Amber Heard

  • Johnny Depp

Fantasy:

  • alchemy

  • halfling

  • sorcerer

  • transmutation

  • fairy

  • wyvern

  • undead

  • demon

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