Job Requirements Game: Explanation

Job Requirements Game

• Details

Name of Item	Job Requirements Game
Activity Type	Warmer / Vocabulary practice game
Student Level	Intermediate - Upper intermediate
Time Allowance	15 - 20 minutes
Preparation Required	Copying 2 worksheets onto different coloured card and cutting out individual cards - 20 minutes per set
Other Items Needed	Scissors / two different colours of copier-friendly card
Vocabulary	job titles / abilities and qualities
Grammar	nothing special

• Instructions

This is based on a popular English-lesson game you probably know already, called Pelmanism (maybe you know it by another name). This one has a little extra twist to it.

The two worksheets need to copied onto two different colours of card, cut out and there needs to be one set for each group of three or four students. To play the game, both sets of card are randomly spread, face down on a table around which the students are gathered. One player starts by picking up a pair of cards, one of each colour.

This pair of cards will provide that student with a job (e.g. Pilot) and a requirement or quality (e.g. Good At Languages). The student then has a limited number of seconds linking the job with the requirement using a sentence of a pre-determined form. You might want to place this on the blackboard / whiteboard before you start. A good target sentence would be:

A teacher needs to be good at typing because she / he has to type many tests.

So faced with his / her two cards, the first student will attempt a sentence (e.g. A pilot needs to be good at languages because she / he has to talk to the passengers.) Whether or not this sentence is good enough, is up to the other members of the group and I think in this case they might possibly reject the sentence about the pilot. If the group do accept it as valid, the student gets to keep the pair of cards and the next student has a go. The winner is the student who accumulates the most pairs of cards by the end of the game.

One of the good things about this version of the game is that students are both trying to be creative with their own sentence creation, and listening critically to the sentences of other class members.