Teachers have turned to games now-a-days in order to try to supplement their ESL classroom lesson plans. Their reason for doing so is to add to the lesson in such a way as to benefit the students more. The benefits are a more co-operative group dynamics and it has been shown that the students actually retain the new material longer and with better comprehension. How do these benefits make students retain this new material longer and with better comprehension??

Games and their Benefits

There are a multitude of benefits ESL teachers can get out of including games in their ESL lesson plans. This is just a small list of benefits many teachers have experienced:

Encourages students to speak spontaneously
Motivates students
It's fun
Helps reinforce the lesson just taught
Helps with reviews of past lesson(s)
Focus is on the student with the teacher just orchestrating
Allows the entire class to participate
Easy to prepare the game
Can be modified to fit ANY age group or grade

It has been well demonstrated in many ESL teachers classrooms that with the inclusion of games in the lesson plan, students actually look forward to what will happen next. After a while with the same teacher, if the teacher follows a regular routine of lesson, game, lesson, game, etc..., then the students usually will pay close attention to the lesson in anticipation of the game that follows. This helps the teacher in many ways such as the students are motivated, focused, behaved, and anticipating to have fun learning English.

But in order for a teacher's inclusion of games in their lesson plans to be successful, there are some things that should be remembered!

The game MUST be appropriate to the lesson. In other words, it MUST be more than just fun. It should be relative to what the students just learned. If the lesson was on animals, then you don't play a game that focuses on countries.
Try to pick a game that would keep everyone involved. Games work best when all the students are interested and involved.
The game should be a friendly competition. Students would compete as a team usually.
It should allow the students an opportunity to try out the word/phrase/lesson just learned. The more practice the students get, the faster their English will improve.

Students quickly pick up ANYTHING when they are having fun. Learning English is no different. Children like to play, so why not include some fun games in the lesson plans?

There are a multitude of resources for finding fun games that could be incorporated into ESL lesson plans. Searching on the internet for "ESL games" will produce thousands of sites available. Many are good and original, and have a lot more than just games on them. Another source of games would be any of the games you played when growing up. Try adapting some of them to your particular lesson plan.

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