This activity works great as review since you can change the questions to target any grammar point. I often use it as a refresher when students return from vacation. It also would work well as an ALT jikoshoukai activity. The relay aspect ensures that all students are participating!
Prep: Write 5-6 questions in English using any grammar points you'd like. (Ex: What were you doing last night? How was your summer vacation?) Have your JTE translate them into Japanese.
In Class:
- Divide students into groups of 5-6 and assign each student in the group with roles A, B, C, etc. Distribute the worksheet for questions and answers.
- Student A goes to the JTE for a question in Japanese and brings this question back to their group. Together they translate the question into English on the worksheet.
- Student B goes to the ALT and asks the same question in English. They bring the ALT's answer back to their group to write on the worksheet.
- Student C returns to the JTE for a new question in Japanese. Student D takes the translated question to the ALT.
- Repeat until all the blanks in the worksheet have been filled in!
- Fastest group with the fewest mistakes is the winner.
Notes:
- Students should not bring the question sheet with them when asking the JTE or ALT.
- If a student has many mistakes in asking their question, I'll send them back to their group to try again.
- The worksheet isn't strictly necessary, you can have the students record answers in their notebook instead.
- To make the game longer or shorter simply alter the number of questions.
This idea doesn't take much time or effort to prepare and can be adapted to various levels, grammar points and duration.
I'm going to use this idea and add it into my repertoire of activities.
I love it. Thank you for sharing.
Using this for New Horizons' "Can I..."/"Can you..." lesson! Great game, thanks for sharing! :)
Instead of the JTE asking the questions, I put the questions on five slides of a pptx file and showed them on the classroom TV kiosk-style. The students just look up, read, and translate when they're ready.
This activity was fantastic. All my JTEs at the school said it was brilliant! I
ll be using this again with different topics. This is great speaking practice for the students. The only changes I made to this was that I assigned each student the role of going to ask for the question, by asking the teacher:Please give me question 1 etc` then the same student then comes back to ask the ALT the question, then the next student then asks for question 2 and so on....I found that to be a lot simpler. I also made sure that I wrote the question on the board in case they forgot. Another thing my JTE suggested was to write down some hints under the japanese questions after we noticed that some students struggled a lot. That hint was in the form of students filling in the missing words. That helps a lot if your students are low level. Thank you so much for sharing, this was so much fun to do with my students.