The first time I saw American kids playing "Guess Who?" in New York many
summers ago, I thought, "This is an ideal game for EFL students in Japan."
Now that it is available to the English teaching community in Japan, I
would like to recommend it as a strong teaching tool, which really makes
English come alive through the active questioning of the players.
First of all, two players or teams are necessary to play the game. One
team uses the red game board and the other uses the blue one. The 24
cards, consisting of fascinating male and female faces, are all flipped up
on the game boards in view of its team members. The teacher gives each
team a mystery face card, which the opposing team cannot see. That card is
propped up in the last row of the game board in view of its team members.
The object of the game is for one team to guess who the other team's
mystery person is via a process of elimination by asking questions about
the mystery person's appearance in English.
These are suggested questions that the teacher can practice with the
students before playing.
Each team can ask one question about the mystery person per team turn. The
opposing team can only give YES or NO answers. When the team asking a
question receives its YES or NO answer, then that team flips down the
cards of the faces that are eliminated via the answer. For example, if the
red teams asks, "Is she wearing a hat?" and the blue team says NO, then
the red team flips down all the faces of women who are wearing hats. It's
very suspenseful and the suspense builds via the gradual process of
elimination.
Students are very keen to be the first to guess the mystery person, so they
listen very carefully to what the opposing team asks them; they also speak
very clearly when asking their own questions.
The first few times your students play this game, they will need to look at
the blackboard or a print with the suggested questions. But after playing
it several times, they will be able to ask the questions on their own. The
game is both entertaining and educational.
Language points:
I always tell the students, we can use "wear" for hat, earrings, glasses,
contact lenses, ring, shoes, socks, belt, dress, shirt, pants, etc. In
Japanese there are various verbs for wearing things on each part of the
body. So clearly, in this case, the English verb "wear" is more
manipulative and easier to use than the Japanese counter-parts. This is
always an interesting language point for the students to absorb. Some older
students often equate "putting on" with "wearing" which can be addressed
as a grammar point for teachers.
Hair color descriptions are also helpful for EFL students. Native speakers
usually say, "She is a blonde, She is a brunette, She is a redhead, She has
brown hair, white hair, gray hair," etc. Japanese usually make mistakes
differentiating between brown hair and red hair. They refer to people with
red hair as having brown hair. So this game is a good way to teach them
how to refer to hair color. (This is really informative as many Japanese
dye their hair these days.)
The same is true with the terminology for beard, moustache, goatee and
bald. These are useful phrases for students to learn when describing
people.
As I mentioned earlier, "Guess Who?" is an enjoyable, suspenseful game which
empowers students to be able to ask questions of description in a natural
way.
It's even fun for the teacher to play against all the students! Can you
beat your students at "Guess Who?" ?
Helene Jarmol Uchida
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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