You all know the great board game of Trivial Pursuit . I just love this game and have had lots of fun playing with friends, although, it must be admitted that the cultural bias of many of the questions makes it a bit more difficult if you are playing in a language  other than your own.

I find it a great game for learning about content as well, something which I find quite important in adult and younger classes. My own downfall is usually the sports category – the orange one in the Genus edition – which I dread!

There are also many online versions of this great game, like this “Bring on the 90’s” edition and “The Daily 20” , all great fun if you are au fait with local news, entertainment, politics, etc. of the particular era or country.

Trivial Pursuit for content revision

Like all TEFL teachers, I always look for ways of using games and other material and making my own version of Trivial Pursuit was a natural consequence.

I made my first adaptation to help my Diploma (DTEFLA and later DELTA) candidates revise terminology and content on courses a bit less seriously and stressfully, which was great fun and this inspired them, of course to copy my idea and make their own sets for their learners!

Here is a sample card with the answers on the back which had categories like Language, Phonology, Skills, Spot that Quote, etc.

tefl

Trivial Pursuit for Language Practice

Inspired by this, one of my DELTA trainees then made a version of the game for our Proficiency students, called, what else, Proficiency Pursuit, with categories of questions that ranged from Transformation to Synomyms to Pronunciation, etc.

Here is a sample card (with the answers printed on the back)

prof

Postscript

It’s a logical consequence that after students have played the game, they can be involved in making their own cards which they can give to other teams, a great language focussed activity which involves lots of dictionary look ups, grammar checking, wikipedias, google and all new technologies brought in.

The reading of the rules itself can also be stage-managed as a highly motivating reading lesson, since the final checking activity is actually playing the game!

So, be playful please. You can be playful with even the most serious content and make it fun to make it more memorable!

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