Thursday, March 03, 2016

IELTS Speaking Part 2 Game

(TESOL Worksheets--IELTS Speaking, Part 2)

All the questions for this game come from this website here: Conversation Questions: Silly Questions.
It's a website I've already linked to once before, but I'm linking to it again because I've repurposed them for an IELTS Part 2 game.

I've found in my IELTS classes that one of the difficulties the students have in expanding their answers is mostly psychological.  They don't think they can expand their answers into a full 1-2 minutes, and so they give up easily.
However, if you push them to speak for the full 2 minutes, they often discover they do in fact have more things to say than they initially thought.  Once this barrier is broken one time, then they usually have no trouble getting to the full 2 minutes on every subsequent practice.  (Although part 2 has a minimum of 1 minute, I usually tell my students to get into the habit of speaking for about 2 minutes during practice, just to increase their confidence for the test.)

For that purpose, I've been using these questions from the silly questions website.
I warn the students in advance that the questions are not IELTS type questions, and in fact are often pretty silly, but explain that being able to respond to ridiculous questions will help them to build up their confidence to respond to anything and everything.

Before class, I copied and pasted the questions on another document, increased the font sized, and cut them up into strips, and then fold them in half so the question can't be seen.  (My document version here: drive, docs, pub--although this document has all the questions copied from the website, in preparing this game, while I'm cutting up the questions into strips, I throw out any questions that I think are inappropriate or lewd.)

The students are divided into teams. Each team selects 5 strips at random.
when they choose the strips from the jar, they are unable to see the question, but after they have drawn their 5 strips, they open them up to see what they have drawn.

The team chooses another team to challenge.  From their 5 questions, they choose the question they like the best, and use that as the challenge question.

The challenged team selects one person to respond.  (The same person can not go twice until all the team mates have had a go).

The challenged person then hears the question.  They are given only 10 seconds to prepare themselves.  (It's a full minute in the IELTS test, but to keep the game moving fast, and to increase the challenge level, they only get 10 seconds in this version.)

They must talk for a full minute with no pauses over 3 seconds.  (The teacher keeps the time.)  If they make it to 1 minute, their team gets 2 points.  If they don't make it to one minute, the team that challenged them gets the point.

If they talk over one minute, they get an additional point for every 15 seconds up to 2 minutes. (So a total of 3 points for 75 seconds, 4 points for 90 seconds, 5 points for 105 seconds, and 6 points for 120 seconds.)

Each team always keeps 5 challenge questions in their hand at all times, so after they've used one up, they get to draw one more for the next round.

And then it's the next team's turn to challenge.

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