Purpose:  To practice speaking and listening skills and the grammatical structure of questions.

Preparation Time:  15-20 minutes, depending on number of students and number of cards needed.

Materials:  Index cards

Preparation:  Choose a topic area that you have already covered in class, so that you are not introducing new material.  There are 4 types of questions that work well with this game: 1) information questions, often beginning with “who”, “what”, “where”, etc.; 2) true-false questions; 3) either/or questions; 4) multiple choice questions, with two or three possible answers.  Use only one type of question form for each game.  Prepare one game of 20 questions on the topic of choice.   

Procedure:

1. Explain and model the activity to the students.  Be sure they understand the nature of the question and answer.
2. If you have a large group, divide the class into teams of 3-4.  For fun, you could ask students to give their team a name.  One person on Team A draws a card and asks Team B the question.  Team B has 30 seconds to arrive at an answer.  Give one point for a correct answer.  If there are more than 2 teams, the asking and answering proceed serially: A-B, B-C, C-D, D-A, etc.  Try to make sure each team has the same number of opportunities to ask and answer questions and that the students rotate the asking and answering roles.

Variations:

• You ask the questions.
• With 3 teams, one asks, the second answers, and the third either agrees or disagrees with the second.
• Ask students to write the questions after agreeing on type of question to use.