ESL Teacher

A fun way I like to review new tenses and also get the lesson off to a relaxed start is to play one of my favourite games – a version of the true/false game. Whichever tense you’ve just been studying, you can adapt the sentences to suit. Here’s how it works:

1. Write five sentences on the board. I always like to write personal sentences because I like to involve my own life in my teaching, so I might choose topics like what I did on my weekend, or my plans for the holidays, depending on the tense I want to practice.
2. At least two of these sentences should be lies. I never tell my students how many are true and how many are false, because then at some stage they can just use a process of elimination.
3. Ask the students to work in groups to decide which sentences are true and which aren’t. They should write down their decision so that they don’t change their mind when they hear what other groups say.
4. After they’ve all decided, ask the groups to tell the class which sentences they think are true and which are false, and write this in a table on the board next to the sentences, so you can see what each group decided.
5. Finally, spill the beans! I usually start with the sentence that everybody guessed correctly (one point for a correct guess) and then jump around to make a bit of a cliffhanger about which group guessed the best. When the sentences are false, I get them to speculate why. Throughout the game they’re using the target tense without even knowing it’s a tense revision!

As an extension, you can also allow students to ask you questions during their decision-making period. I always say that I’ll answer any question but I don’t promise to tell the truth, so they have to try and figure out if I’m giving them a real answer or not. It’s a lot of fun!

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