Indeed; games and competitions are a valuable learning tool in both second and foreign language classes. Sure, it can be argued that their effectiveness diminishes as the age of the students rises; nevertheless, I've found that under the right conditions they work quite well with university students.

Counter to the popular belief of relatively inexperienced teachers that the old "chalk and talk" method of teaching will get good results is the recognition by more experienced teachers that anything you can do to make your classes more interactive will get even better results. Moreover, teachers who have not been trained in second or foreign language acquisition ultimately frustrate their students by being lecturers first and listeners second.

This year I'm only teaching Extensive Reading classes; however, I often hear complaints from my students about the inexperienced teachers at our college. For example, their writing teachers would rather use their gift for gab than actually have the students writing. Conversely, one of their communication teachers would rather have them writing. Go figger................

My classes have been quite delightful last week and this. I've arranged a competition for them as a means of review where I put them into groups of four. Each group writes down questions pertaining to class work we've done since last September and then each group member asks questions of another class member. At the end of the class, three periods, whichever group has accumulated the most points through correct answers is the winner. They're thoroughly enjoying this and I see it as a very effective means of review. In addition it reduces my role to that of participant as a judge if the class can't come to an agreement (peer work - very effective also) and observer rather than teacher, and, in my opinion, that should be the goal of a foreign language or second language teacher; that is, reaching the point in your classrooms where the language is being acquired rather than learned or taught and the teachers role has been reduced to that of a participant in the process.

Well, anyway, I'm in full agreement with you, gingermeggs. I think we're on the same page. Don't worry about the "blah blah" group; that's just their nature. I pity their students, though. After sitting through mind numbingly boring, learn by rote classes conducted by their Chinese teachers who simply don't know better, they have to march into the same atmosphere with many of their foreign teachers. The sad part about that is that part of the marketing ploy to get them to enroll in such schools is that they have "well experienced and creative foreign teachers who bring their new methods of language training to our school-" or something like that. Not..............