YELL 2 International Conference: Sharing to Inspire Language Education Across Europe

USING GAMES TO LEARN LANGUAGES

PhD Katarina Aladrović Slovaček, research assistantThe Faculty for Teacher Education, Zagreb - Croatia

THE REPUBLIC OF THE REPUBLIC OF CROATIACROATIA

• Situated along the coast of the Adriatic Sea, on the border of the Central and the South-Eastern Europe.

• It has about 4.5 million inhabitants, most of whom are Croats (about 90%).

• Its capital is Zagreb.

• The official language is Croatian.

ABOUT PLAYING

The game is the child's natural activity (homo ludens – the playing man)-

Each game has clear and priorly agreed rules.

The game is one of the basic activities through which the child enters and discovers the world of adults and which gives the child the opportunity to enjoy playing, moving, pronouncing and communicating with other game participants.

It is also an important link in the process of the child's socialization and therefore has a multifunctional role in its growing-up

LANGUAGE GAMES

The language games are defined as the area where the adults and the children free themselves in their own language.

The game can be divided into three types: functional, symbolical and the game with rules.

GAMES help the pupils to learn, repeat, exercise and get motivated.

When playing, the children learn, which creates a positive atmosphere in the class, unconstrained and free, and therefore such learning is not difficult for children.

CITIES AND VILLAGES

Table: City • Village • River • Mountain • Animal • Plant

The game starts by determining a fixed order of turns for the players (maybe alphabetically, age, height etc). The first player starts to recite the alphabet and waits to be interrupted by another player (who this is, should be agreed for each turn) effectively stopping ‘‘randomly’’ on a specific letter of the alphabet.

At this point all players / learners begin to fill in the boxes of the table using the target language. They insert a word for each category starting with the letter of the alphabet that has been selected.

DISCOVER THE CRIME

The game starts when the guide had told to players what happened.

After that, he/she wait for player’s questions. Answer should be yes or no. The aim is to discover the crime, to discover what was happened. Players can play in two or three groups and compete yourself.

Characters in Writing

Students offers different names (eg Leopoldina noble Hatz, Zrinka Pedal, Vesela Vesna Rajic). Their task is to come up with the characters of the given story and all the characters interrelate.

The most successful story dramatizes after evaluation. In dramatizes are all participating students. Assessment is carried jury composed of 5 members. During this game students develop imagination, practice writing the text and plot and ultimately practicing voice acting values each role.

Introduce me

Students first invent some fanciful names for devices (eg a device for measuring the number of spoken words per minute). Costly to all ideas and put into one pile. One by one student comes out, pulls out of the bag the name of the device and it should be promoted to others for one minute. Students were divided into two groups, and there are three members of the jury.

Jury gives each commercial grade from 1 to 5 and so each group collects your points. Group whose members better showcase their devices will be victorious. The prize is chocolate.