Word matching classroom game

Of course, you can divide students into groups by telling them to form groups or by counting them off and letting the 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. work together. But it's more fun to give them a small task to find their partner(s). An easy way is to cut up a picture and have them find each other by matching the pieces, but I teach a language and to adults, so I wanted something more interesting.

My first idea was to cut up English words and hand those out, so they could find their partners. As I was preparing this, I noticed I could play with it even more by adding pairings that would work in the students' native language (Dutch), basically to confuse them a little bit more. After an hour or so of puzzling, googling, and using the American corpus for inspiration, I came up with a full circle of words that form correct English words when read one way and correct Dutch words when read another way. Here's the list:

over - stock
car - toon
bank - note
ring - ing
ang - le
pel - vis
pas - ta
bel - ong
are - as
falt - er
ger - man
den - ver

When read this way, you see twelve English words, but when you combine the second part on each line with the first part of the next line, they form a correct Dutch word as well! And it goes full circle as ver combines with over again to form the Dutch word for conquer. Pretty neat, huh?

So instead of using this activity to put them in pairs, I decided to play it as a classroom game where they would have to use their knowledge of vocabulary in both languages, but more importantly, use their verbal English skills to negotiate and discuss with each other about the possibilities.

In the first part of the game, I told them they needed to find their partner by matching their word part. Sometimes this led to confusion as a part like ing can combine with bank and car as well. I resolved this confusion before I told them about the ring they had to form. They reminded them to speak English at all times.

In the larger group of 20 something students, it didn't work out very well. The part of finding their partner was ok, but in forming the circle there was simply no way for all of them to become engaged and they lost interest. However, in groups of up to ten, it worked out very well as they could all gather around the papers to figure out how it worked. With some help from my end, they were able to do it quite quickly and it served as a fun little break in the class.