The acronym TESOL means Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Students of English generally need to enact a lot of repetition to really grind in the concepts of English and the extensive vocabulary. Teachers can motivate their students by playing fun games to help them practice.

Odd Word Out
This game is helpful when practicing vowel sounds. Give students four words, with three of them rhyming with each other and one "odd" word that does not rhyme with the others. For example, write down the words Go, So, No and Do. Although these words are all spelled with the same vowel, there is one odd word that does not rhyme with the others. Odd Word Out emphasizes the slight differences in pronunciation of the same vowel in different words.

What's The Word?
Players are divided into teams and each player takes a turn acting out a particular verb phrase chosen from a card. If the player's team guesses the verb phrase, he must then use the word correctly in a sentence to earn his team a point. There can be more than two teams for a large class. Put the scores of each team on the board for everyone to see.

Hot Seat
Divide the students into two teams and place two chairs in the middle of the room facing the class and not the chalkboard. One student from each team sits in the "hot seat" and faces the rest of the students in the classroom. The teacher writes two words on the chalkboard, one for each team, and the teams must try to get their player in the hot seat to correctly guess the word on the chalkboard before the other team's player guesses his word. The first player to say the correct word gets a point for his team.

Hangman
Hangman is a simple game to practice English vocabulary. Start by choosing a particular topic, such as jobs, food or sports. Then you display the number of letters in the word by making a mark under each letter placement. Students guess one letter per turn to try to spell the word, winning by spelling the entire word. Each wrong guess brings the hangman closer to the noose. Depending on the level of your students, you may want to make the game easier by giving away some of the letters.