How to Teach Language With Kids' Games

Games are effective in teaching foreign language to children, as they are often based on repetition and players are motivated by competition to get the right answers. Whether you turn to the Internet or purchase board or card games that utilize language skills, the goal is the same--to get children familiar with speaking a new language. The games can include any foreign language, American Sign Language, Native American languages or the English language and its many components.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Assist English language skills including long and short vowels, consonants, prefixes, suffixes, vocabulary, similes, idioms and metaphors when you use specialized board or card games. Numerous companies sell games in educational magazines and catalogs, educational product stores, other retail stores or on the Internet (see Resources).

2. Create your own games such as Concentration, Old Maid or Go Fish. Make card games that require the participant to match words to their meaning. Match parts of words to create a complete word, or match a foreign language word or sentence to its English counterpart.

3. Use online games to teach language skills and knowledge. The games offer the learner excitement with an interactive approach, motivation with rewards for correct answers and encouragement to strive for mastery and reach for a higher level of achievement.

4. Utilize Internet games for language skill repetition that leads to mastery, and games motivate and encourage a learner to move to a higher language level. It's unlikely a child will feel like a failure for not meeting the goal when the game ends, because most games praise the learner's accomplishments, give immediate feedback and corrections to mistakes and encourage the child to try again.

5. Establish a language performance goal for the learner, and incorporate language games to meet the objective.

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure the pupil understands the object of the game, the rules and how to execute moves to achieve the objective.

Resources

• Purchase language games here
• Find children's language games here
• Use TheEnglishLanguage.org to find game companies

[apalmer]

on 1/28/2009 Interesting article!