The string game
By Mel Hutton

This game is really useful for getting shy students to speak. It can also be a fun way to practice extended speaking for exams, and requires very little preparation indeed.

Get enough pieces of string so that you have one for each group. The pieces of string should be really long, probably about 4m each. Give each group their piece of string, keeping one for yourself to demonstrate the activity with. The rules are:

• Each person in the group will take turns to be the 'string winder', or the 'string police'. The string police will go to another group to make sure there's no cheating!
• The teacher will say the topic, eg holidays, and the string winder will talk about this topic while winding the string (not too tight!) around one finger. If they are not speaking they can't wind, and it's the job of the string police to say 'stop!' if the winder isn't speaking but is still winding.
• If the winder can't think of anything to say their team can give them ideas and suggestions.
• The first winder to finish winding their string gets 5 points for their team, the second gets 4 points etc. When all the winders have finished the string goes to the next winder, string police change and we have another round with a new topic.

I've found that this game gets even the shyest students speaking, and having fun at the same time.

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THE CHAT ROOM
BY JO BUDDEN

This activity was presented to me by a teacher I met a couple of years ago on a training course, so thanks go to Carme for this one.  It can be especially useful if you have to substitute a class at the last minute as it takes no preparation at all. Each student needs a blank piece of paper and a pen. Tell them they are going into a pre-historic internet chat room so they all need to decide on a nickname. Tell students that you are going to be the net and you will need to stand in the middle of the circle to exchange the papers. Explain that the net has gone a little bit crazy and they can’t send messages to specific people. If you have a big group ask a student or two to help you be the net in the middle.

Give students an example of how to start. Eg. Pingu: How are you feeling today? As students complete their questions they should hold the paper in the air and then you swap the papers over as if their messages are being sent. They then reply to the one they’ve just received and so it goes on until each student has a page full of ‘chat’. Then give the papers back to the student who wrote the initial question and they can see how the chat developed. This could lead on to talking about the internet, or chat rooms or you could use the text to do some error correction. As students have been writing quickly there will probably be lots of silly mistakes they can correct themselves.

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