Improving LISTENING AND PRONUNCIATION Through Charades
We, humans, love to play, and very often we won’t even realize that we are learning while we are having so much fun. Charades is a quick and easy game that everyone can join in, and in the midst of this group activity we can practice our listening and pronunciation skills. Learn how to play charades, how to teach others to play charades and what skills everyone will be practicing so that you will know how best to organize a game in the future.
Playing Charades
Charades is a game based on miming words or phrases. Normally these answers are written onto slips of paper and players are divided into either two-person teams, or two large teams with equal numbers of players. As each player takes his or her turn as the mime, (s)he pulls a slip of paper and then must act out the answer without using any words. The team who takes the least amount of time to guess each of their answers wins the overall game. There may be themes to the charades, such as all movie titles or book characters, if the players all agree. If the answer is made up of more than one word, players often hold up their fingers to indicate how many words there are in the answer and/or which word they will be acting out first.
Teaching Charades
Most of us instinctively understand what it means to act out our answers, but it never hurts to remind everyone that only the person doing the miming can read the answer slip and that player may not speak at all during the miming.
Charades and Skills Practice
Charade is a game that usually evokes a great deal of laughter, but in the midst of all this fun everyone gets the chance to practice a lot of different listening and pronunciation skills. In between giggles everyone will: - Become more confident about speaking in public (saying out answers out loud).
- Practice correct pronunciation of many different words (guesses).
- Learn to think and speak quickly and uninhibitedly.
- Practice parts of speech (for themes or clues of "verbs", "nouns", etc).
- Think about the arrangement of words (if words are mimed out of order).
- Explore synonyms when their guesses come close but aren’t quite right.
- Explore homonyms or rhymes if games include "sounds like" clues.
Organizing Games of Charades
Organizing games of charades is quick, easy and free. If possible, organize games which have people of relatively the same age so that their listening and pronunciation skills will be roughly on par. Provide a theme for which everyone will have some background, perhaps book titles you know they have read or items in the house. Come up with clues that everyone will be able to understand. Remind everyone that no mimes can be rude or cruel. Finally, offer a fun reward for the winning team and be sure to praise all players who mime and offer guesses as to the answers.
Once you understand how to play and how to teach others to play, recognize the skills you will be developing during an average game and use this information to better organize games suited for you (and everyone around you) as you improve listening and pronunciation skills!
