39 ESL Vocabulary Activities: For Teenagers and Adults - Jackie Bolen, Jennifer Booker Smith 2015
Quiz show review game
Games and activities for all levels
Skills: Speaking/Listening
Time: 30-45 minutes
Materials: PowerPoint chart, or whiteboard and questions
This is a "Jeopardy" style quiz game that works especially well as a review game before a test. Although most teachers spend a lot of time making this game by using PowerPoint, it really isn't necessary. There are a number of free no-prep Jeopardy games available online, or you can simply write up the grid on the whiteboard before class starts in less than a minute. It should only take you 5-10 minutes to prepare the questions if you're familiar with the material so it really is a low-prep game.
Make up categories such as definitions, words in context, synonyms and antonyms. Think of questions that range from easy ($100) to difficult ($500). Put the students in groups of 3-4 and have them pick their category and question. The students can pick whatever they want, but the key is if they answer it correctly, they get the points. If they answer incorrectly, the question's point value is subtracted from their score. I put in a few +/- $500/$1000 and “choose your own wager” (up to $1000) to make it more interesting and give the lower level teams a chance to catch up.
There are a few different ways that you can get students to answer questions such as being the first entire team to put their hands up or hitting a buzzer but those options can get pretty chaotic. Instead, I do this activity in a more controlled fashion with each team choosing questions in order, one at a time.
Don't spend too much time thinking of questions if your goal is to review vocabulary. You can use ones that require an understanding of a given vocabulary word to answer the questions, or you can use things like synonyms, antonyms and definitions.
Teachings Tips:
Something I do to make it more interesting for the other teams who are not answering the question is tell the students that some of the questions from the game are actual questions on the exam that they're usually doing the next week. I don't think I've ever had so many students paying such close attention to anything before! And of course, put in a few of the game questions on the test to reward those who were listening closely.
For older and more advanced students, if you want to make this game more student-centered and also practice writing and questions forms, you can get the students to make the questions. Put the students into groups of 3-4 and give them the general categories. Then, for each category, they have to submit one easy, one medium and one difficult question. Compile their questions and play the game in the next class you have together. A team might be lucky and get its own question, but it shouldn't happen too often.
Procedure:
1. Make a list of review terms and assign them to different categories such as definitions, synonyms, etc. This depends on the number of categories but 25 works well (5x5).
2. Make sure each team gets asked an equal number of questions.
3. Put students into teams of 3-6 and do rock-scissors-paper to see who goes first.
4. The first team chooses a category and a price. Ask them that question. If correct, they get the points and you can eliminate that question from your board. If incorrect, they lose those points and that question remains in play so that another team can answer it.
5. The next team chooses a question. Follow the same procedure as above.
6. Continue the game until most or all of the questions are gone and all the teams have had a chance to answer an equal number of questions.