Britain vs. America game

So, how to discuss the differences between British (BrE) and American English (AmE)? Some of them are simple spelling issues like -ise/ize, -re/er, or -our/or, but there are vocabulary differences as well. These usually come in the form of lists to memorize: boring!

Instead of going over the list in the book, I decided to make a game out of it. I picked 24 of the most useful or interesting pairs and put them on individual cards. At the top of the card was one version and smaller, with “equivalent” before it, the other version. So this meant there were now 24 card pairs with one of the pair having the BrE version at the top and the other the AmE one. For clarity’s sake, I included a small picture to be sure students would know the meaning of the word and so that I would be able to include those interesting pairings where one word means one thing in BrE, but something else in AmE. For example, bill is the AmE version of banknote as in BrE bill carries the same meaning as check in AmE.

I put the word cards in six envelopes, making sure to divide the pairs so that both versions wouldn’t end up in the same envelope. The class was divided into six groups and each group got one envelope with eight cards to lay out in front of them, taking care to hide from sight. Group 1 got to play first, choosing one in their midst to start the game. The other five groups had to in turn ask this member of group 1 a yes/no question regarding the item on his or her card, basically playing Twenty Questions. The goal, however, was not to find out what was on this person’s card, but whether the group had the equivalent card. It was against the rules to simply ask whether the card was the equivalent of X. If a group thought they had the right card, they could shout “stop” at any moment, so whether it was their turn or not. If they were right, the group got 20 points minus 1 for each question asked. If they were wrong, they got a five-point penalty.

Generally, the classes enjoyed the game with some individual students getting into it so much they’d argue with me over cards or points. :-) The drawback was that some groups would figure out soon enough that none of their cards was the equivalent, which obviously meant they somewhat lost interest in this round. I introduced the possibility of passing their turn to ask a question, which meant the equivalent was found a little bit sooner. Sometimes none of the groups thought they had the equivalent, so I introduced the extra scoring rule that the group at play would get the remaining question points if all groups passed. This actually happened a few times and was only more fun as the group that turned out to have the equivalent would hit themselves over the head for losing their opportunity at scoring some points.

It’s been my experience that competitive games that bear a clear link to the matter at hand go down very well in adult groups. They want to see the logic in playing the game as they’ve long since passed the age of wanting to play for the sake of playing.

A game such as this is quite easy to make: I used the table function in Word to make the cards and Google Images for the pictures. In all, it took me no more than three hours to think of how to play the game, make the cards, sort them into envelopes, and create the accompanying PowerPoint slides for the explanation.