Anyone for tennis?

Now if Lord Sutch hasn’t used or blogged this somewhere, I’ll eat my racquet. With Wimbledon in full swing I would like to hold court on an idea my MFL teaching wife served up to help vocab acquisition. With a few embellishments from me, here is an idea for verbal tennis based starter I am going to use with my Economists tomorrow, but should be equally at home anywhere.

The group have been working hard on learning the theory doing some prep for a big open question. To see how they are getting along I am going to split them into threes, two players and an umpire (there is a differentiation opportunity here for those who don’t use sets). One player has to serve a subject term and their opponent has to return with a related term and so on until there is too long a hesitation or the umpire deems the term to unrelated and calls out. Each player is allowed one challenge per game if they disagree with the umpire. They will need to argue their challenge and I will act as the match referee if they can’t decide who is right.

It will be interesting to see the different courts in action around the room, who has the competitive edge and the longest rally. Not only should it help their recollection of the terminology, but hopefully will also help them make links between different topic areas. To test this theory I will probably need some baseline data to see the net effect though.