Here’s how to motivate your students to learn English. Use this game, and even the shy ones will participate!

Elaine Lovell gets her students motivated!

First, let’s hear from Elaine Lovell and hear about her experience with the game. And then, lower down, you will find a description of the game from my games book for teens and adults.

“I received your book last night and read the Introduction just before entering my ESOL/English class. I was keen to try something from your book because, though I have a reputation for being creative as a maths and music teacher, I have never been responsible for teaching English and needed inspiration! Since I only took on the role of teaching English a couple of months ago, I could not get my head around creating the atmosphere I normally encourage.

Just from your Introduction, where you briefly mention some of the activities and where and why they would be useful or appropriate, I tried your suggestion of verbally spelling words out for students to work out the word. I did it with two teams, started with the Dolch list (the 220 most common words) and progressed quickly, by student request, to speeding up the reading of the letters and then by making the words harder/longer.

It works!

You were right – a very quiet student even took part by blurting out the word for his small team on two occasions!  And this from a student that normally never speaks! My class was alive with cheering, clapping, and counting points, and I felt great! Your book is my missing inspiration catalyst – thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Elaine Lovell, offender learning teacher in the UK.

Thanks Elaine for sharing how to motivate students to learn English, it gives teachers inspiration to use games in the classroom. ESL teachers, please check out my ESL games books for all ages, face to face, and online. You can find them on Amazon in paperback too.

The game

Spell and Speak from ESL Classroom Activities for Teens and Adults

Put players into teams and spell out a word such as ‘l-i-g-h-t’ or ‘b-o-u-g-h-t’. As soon as a student has identified the word, they knock on their desk and give you the answer, gaining points if correct. With more advanced players, this is an excellent game to highlight certain words, such as ‘bow’, which can be pronounced in two different ways, with different meanings, and which can be a noun and a verb.

Also, use this game to draw attention to words with silent letters (as in light and bought). Also interesting are words that sound the same but have different spellings (such as whine and wine, heel and heal, flour and flower whether and weather, or that rhyme but have different spelling patterns, such as den and when, graph and staff). In addition, use this game to work on words your students frequently misspell (recommend, apartment, principle/principal, practice/practise or exercise).

Homework assignment

Give a homework assignment where each person prepares a list of three words that they think are difficult to spell. Divide everyone into teams and play Spell and Speak, with each team selecting its own words. Each team member takes a turn at saying a word for another team to spell. Award a point for correct spelling. Team members write words on the board simultaneously, which you check as you go along. With small groups, students can spell words out loud rather than writing them down, which is harder.

Advanced students

Advanced students will get more out of the game if you tell them to prepare a list of words for homework. Give them some examples of good words to use, such as words with silent letters or strange spellings.

Business students

With business students, include useful and frequently misspelled words such as recommend, necessary, amendment, fulfil, referral, and unnecessary. Note that spellings may vary between North America and the rest of the world. Fulfil is UK spelling, whereas Fulfill is American.

Fun resources to get your students motivated

Order my ESL games books in download.

Or find them on my author page at Amazon.

Please use this book if you are an online ESL teacher: ESL Online Games