Adjective guessing game

To make the point that you should be careful with your choice of words, I created a simple game to play first and then do a matching task. I picked 24 adjectives that are pairs in that one has a neutral or positive meaning and the other a negative one. Students first had to use creative descriptions and then negotiate the word meaning.

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:

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.