Language and Literature Revision Games

I once had a line manager whose background was in PE, and he was utterly determined to get us to gamify everything. Create a league table for the longest speeches in a speaking assessment. Give students house points for finishing the reading quickly, regardless of their level of understanding. Always have a winner, even for open-ended, creative projects. Alfie Kohn would lose his mind.

Although I’m highly skeptical of gamifying where no game is needed (intrinsic motivation, kids), I do really love this time of the year, when my Year 11 class have already covered all the English course content and they’re ready for some fun revisionchallenges alongside the serious timed responses and walking-talking mocks. Hereare five of our favourite revision games for English language and literature, collected, borrowed and adapted from various places over the years. Hopefully they’ll be useful for you too!

N.B. Assessment Objectives (AOs) given here are for Cambridge IGCSE 0475.

1. Literature: Game of Quotes

How to play: You give students a category. They have two minutes to flick through their copy of the text to find a relevant quote. You pick someone at random to share first, then let students put up a hand if they think they can give a better answer. Choose a winner each time.

Example categories: Things you wouldn’t say in front of your teacher. How you’d describe your best friend. A good excuse for being late. Something you’d shout if you stubbed your toe.

Skills: Apart from textual knowledge (AO1), students are getting practice at flipping through the text, skimming and scanning for suitable evidence. This isuseful for open-book exams in particular.

We’ve included a basic template in this set of resources.

2. Literature: Last Student Standing

How to play: Give each student a mini whiteboard and a pen. They get 30 seconds to write something on their whiteboard in the category you’ve given them – but if their answer matches anyone else’s, both students are out. Get students to stand in a circle, give them the category, then ask them to show their boards after thirty seconds. Any students with matching boards have to sit down, then start round 2, and so on until you’ve only got one student left standing as your winner. (You’ll need to choose categories with fewer and fewer possible answers).

Example categories: Characters, key vocabulary (e.g. Igbo words used in Things Fall Apart), themes, contextual information.

Extension: Choose plot points as your category, but keep all students standing. Ask them to arrange themselves in the correct order – without talking for a bonus challenge.

Skills: This really helps to build understanding (AO1), and especially helps students to think beyond the most obvious answers. You could even try this with an analytical focus: give students a quotation and ask them to come up with a unique way to analyse it (AO3), or perhaps a unique personal response (AO4).

3. Literature and Language: Taboo

How to play: Students have a set of cards, provided by you (or get them to make their own then swap sets between their groups). Each card has a key word at the top, and a list of relevant banned words at the bottom. Divide each group of students into two teams, and get each team to choose their first speaker. When the timer starts, the speaker has to get their team to say the word at the top of their card, without using any of the other words on the card. Give them 30 seconds to work through as many cards as they can, then move onto the next team’s first speaker, and so on. Remember you’ll need a student from the opposing team to make sure each speaker isn’t cheating by watching their card carefully.

Example cards: We’ve included a subject terminology set that was made easily using AI (and then edited to make sure it was accurate and useful).

Skills: Speaking skills, of course, plus building whatever knowledge you’re revising!

4. Language: Soup, Salad or Sandwich

How to play: Designate one corner of your room for each category (I use a whiteboard pen to draw a little sandwich, salad plate and soup bowl on windows / whiteboards). Give students a series of food items, and keep it easy to start: chicken soup, chicken sandwich, chicken salad. Next, make it harder: where would a chicken burger fit? What about a live chicken? When you think students are ready, make it more abstract and get them debating with each other. Is a cloud a soup, salad or sandwich? How about a human? How would you categorise the world?

Skills: If you’re running speaking exams, this is excellent for getting students excited to speak. If not, it’s also useful for persuasive / transactional writing tasks – it encourages students to explain and defend their position, as well as develop their answers when challenged. It’s a great game for sparking creativity, too.

5. Language: Prove Me Wrong

How to play: Students get a mini whiteboard each. In the middle, they have to write a statement that they think is uncontroversial – something no one could disagree with. For example: planes are bad for the planet. Students then rotate and add annotations to three other whiteboards, using the following prompts:

· Yes and (for developments)

· Yes but (for qualifications)

· No because (for rebuttals)

Skills: This is another one that’s really good for building those persuasive / discursive / transactional writing skills – students are forced to think of different ways to develop and debate ideas. We also use this framework for teaching the evaluation part of the Cambridge IGCSE Directed Writing task, in case that’s useful for you (possibly another blog post to come on that topic…).

Want more ideas? Comment and we’ll write Part 2! Happy exam season, and may the questions be ever in your favour.