Game Corner

Listening Lottory

Helene Jarmol Uchida
April 2003

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Welcome to my Game Corner. Each month I introduce a game for you to use in your classes to help make English come alive. If you are interested in any of these products, feel free to visit the Little America site for viewing and ordering information.

Almost everyone enjoys the camaraderie of being huddled around in a circle, captured by the excitement of a friendly, fast-paced game.

Listening Lottory is such a game whose objectives are to improve listening skills, associate sounds with their appropriate pictures, expand vocabulary, develop language skills, think in English under pressure without reverting to Japanese and enjoy guessing without the fear of making a mistake. But this game is so much fun that the teacher and the students get caught up in the excitement of the play and often forget that it actually is an English teaching tool.

Listening Lottory consists of four Lottory playing boards, thirty-two picture playing cards (vocabulary), a tape cassette consisting of six sound sequences and a teacher's guide.

How to play:

1. Players receive a playing board. If there are more than four players, the teacher can have several students share a board.
2. The first time of play the teacher can introduce the cards one at a time while the students repeat. This is not necessary for future games because the vocabulary is easy to acquire.
3. All thirty two picture cards are placed face-up at the center of the table.
4. The tape cassettes is played. Upon hearing the sound from the tape cassettes, the students shout out the name of the card which corresponds to that sound. For example, if the students hear a dog barking, then they say DOG! The first student to say the word receives the DOG card from the teacher who picks it up from the pile and hands it to the student.
5. The first student or group of students to cover their playing board with eight cards wins the game.

Listening Lottory also fosters giggling and laughter because the sounds are often so funny, like the screeching of the pig, the belching of a frog or the quacking of a duck. The amazing thing about this game is how quickly the students get engrossed in it and how capable they are in responding to sounds in English. They absorb the vocabulary naturally. There is no way they can win if they speak Japanese or translate in their minds. Everyone who plays is a winner!

Helene Jarmol Uchida is a veteran teacher with teaching, curriculum development and teacher training experience in the U.S., Greece and Japan. She is the director of the Fukuoka-based Little America English Schools and lectures at Fukuoka Kyoiku Daigaku. She holds the LATEM seminars every year in cities throughout Japan and is also the author of 'The Challenge Book', an interactive English book and CD especially created for Japanese elementary school students.

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