ESL Games: Have Fun with English 

ESL Games are some of the best ways to practice the English you’re learning. Because they’re fun, they are a great break from memorizing and drill. They provide the repetition you need without “boring you to tears.”

ESL Games: learn while you play. Memory games, 20 questions, team games, & more- so many ways to make trview fun. Picture of adult students playing a card game.English class can be fun!

Are you afraid of making mistakes? Games are even more valuable if you’re embarrassed to use your English in front of anyone.

Focusing on the challenges of the game relieves anxiety and self-consciousness. It frees your mind to process English words and structures at a deeper level.

Games are great for classrooms for the same reasons.They're a way to encourage speaking in English without pressure.

There’s a wonderful variety of games available for English practice.

There are group games for classes or parties, or to play with your friends. There are also many games you can play alone.

For both group and individual printable (pdf) games for ESL classes, see Printable ESL Classroom Games.

Group Games

Team Games include Charades, Taboo, and class relays. Teams can play Jeopardy- style games, or you can play them online, with a friend or alone. 

Classes can play 20 Questions (The Question Game) and similar Guess-what-I’m thinking games. They can also play simple commercial or teacher-made board games. Scrabble and most other commercial word games are good for advanced students. (Remember, they are designed for native English speakers.) 

There are suggestions for using them on The Question Game and Multiplayer Free Word Games.

Online Games

This page is especially designed to describe the various games you can play on EnglishHints. But I’d like to call out a couple of other sites that impressed me with their colorful variety of dynamic online games for classes or individuals.

Games to Learn English has beginner and especially intermediate games to practice sentence structure and vocabulary at the same time, including making sentences about the images shown and even practicing similes and phrasal verbs. It’s suitable for older kids through adults and for individuals or small groups.

Many of the games only move on to the next screen when you get the complete phrase or sentence right, which means there’s no buzzers or red Xs to mark incorrect answers—just hints when necessary. Each game reviews the vocabulary and phrases (sometimes with different, though related, pictures). I was impressed by the variety and quality of the games.

Most of the games on ESL Games Plus teach fairly basic grammar and vocabulary for kids or elementary classrooms. They use bright colors and video game themes like pirates, animals, space, and dinosaurs to keep kids practicing and engaged.

On EnglishHints itself, see Vocabulary Games and Activities for matching games, crosswords, fill-ins, and Odd One Out.  There are Concentration (Memory) games to practice several language lessons.

My students and I have played Concentration with hand-made cards, offline. It’s lots of fun! It's also excellent practice matching the pasts and presents of irregular verbs, as we did. It's also good for matching words and their definitions. Beginners can match words with their pictures.)

Children often match a pair of identical pictures, or playing cards. (Sort playing cards to ensure there are two of each type of card used. There could be a three of diamonds and a three of clubs, or two jacks or queens, etc.)

For instructions and links to various concentration games, go to Concentration Games.

You can also go directly to Custom Memory Game 1, or Custom Memory Game 2 for the phrasal verb games.

You can match words from three Latin roots with their meanings at Roots Memory Game 1, Memory Game 2, and Memory Game 3.

Match irregular past tenses with their present tenses with Irregular Verb Memory Game 1, Game 2, and Game 3.

Each of those game pages has a link to its mobile version. If you have a small screen, try turning it (landscape mode.) If you still can't see the full regular 4x3 card grid, click the mobile link in the first or second paragraph. You'll get a long, narrow (2x6) grid of cards to turn over.

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