Games for Guests

Much communicative language learning develops through the use of games. These games may be both oral and written – crosswords, acrostics, puzzles, story telling, quizzes. Language teachers are well versed in a wide repertoire of games and activities that can help draw learners out of themselves and into communicative interaction. These games take myriad forms in the tourist language classroom and aim at repeating vocabulary and syntax structures so that gradually the language can be learned, embodied and reproduced with ease, fluently, and with attention being paid as much to the process of the game as to the grammatical structures. Just as in theatrical rehearsal processes games may be used to induce role play, characterisation, concentration and development of muscle memory to embody scripts, so in the tourist language classroom contexts are developed in which there can be a rehearsal of phrases, words and imagined contexts in which the language may be used in conversation, allowing sociality to flow.