I completed a game-based activity that provides for a relaxed and fun learning opportunity for young students. Games are in incredible way for students to explore new grammatical, sociolinguistic, and discourse communicative competency techniques. In a game based activity, students need to be able to appropriately interact with on another while also working on their vocabulary and sentence structure while yet still working on their problem solving techniques. This format is incredibly important to the social and emotional development of young children. They often have trouble working through difficult emotions such as confusion, competitiveness, and frustration. Games often have children experience all of these things, and this experience can allow them to work on processing these emotions in a positive and developmentally appropriate way, all while achieving the language objective of the target language.

This game-based activity is centered around the concept of 20 questions. This would be an informal assessment of the students. I would use this as a formative assessment, but it could very easily be considered summative. In the context of a young ELL classroom, I would use this game to assess where students are in terms of vocabulary and forming questions. I would be assessing two learning objectives for this lesson. At the end of the lesson, students should be able to describe pictures of food using the vocabulary words and also be able to ask and answer one question at a time. Let’s Go: Let’s Begin Student Book 4th Edition Unit 6 is centered around food and food related situations for students. In order to connect this game-based activity to the chapter, the students will be asked to use vocabulary connected to the theme of the chapter. The chapter also has a portion based on asking questions in a conversational standpoint. For this activity, students will be asked to come up to the front of the room, one at a time, on a volunteer basis. The teacher will give the student a food that is present in the lesson. Students should have time to think about the food and its descriptions. The remaining students in the class will be given the opportunity to ask questions about the food in order to try to guess what food the student is thinking of. While 20 questions is normally only yes/no questions, the teacher will encourage students to ask yes/no and open-ended questions. The teacher will give the students examples of questions to help get them started.

Is it a breakfast/lunch/dinner food?

Is it a hot or cold food?

What color is it?

Is it a fruit or veggie?

The game will be completed when the food is guessed. The teacher can provide assistance and guidance when appropriate to encourage guessing and encourage students who have yet to speak. The game can be played as many rounds as time allows. The teacher will be able to assess the learning objectives by listening to each student as they ask questions and as the student in the front replies. They can determine the depth of food related vocabulary from all students as well as the question forming ability of the students in the “audience.”