ESL grammar games for focusing on form

ESL grammar games can be used to facilitate the repeated use of certain target structures, this is vital to the learning and retention of new grammar forms. Grammar games come in many forms, but they all have this single aim at their heart, to repeatedly and accurately use or manipulate language structures to achieve a specific aim.

Grammar games and activities by form

I have decided to start grouping activities together on single pages. This will enable me to post shorter ideas which don’t warrant a whole post.

Present Simple

Lots of ideas for presenting and practising the present perfect including forms of to be, find someone who, adverbs of frequency, third-person interviews.

Present Continuous

Activities in this section include charades, describing clothing, describing pictures and video scenes and asking about activities.

Past Simple

Fun activities to help students learn irregular verbs, question formation and past simple time markers.

Past Continuous

Using the past continuous to talk about what was happening at specific times and instructions for the popular Alibi activity.

Present Perfect

Lots of activities for practising the present perfect in the contexts of unfinished time, life experience and connection to the present.

Present Perfect Continuous

Activities for practising the present perfect continuous to talk about ongoing activities and for distinguishing since and for.

Past Perfect

Activities for practising the past perfect including explaining away perplexing predicaments.

Future Forms

Activities for practising future form present continuous, going to and will. Includes making arrangements, talking about travel, making predictions and the popular fortune-telling activity

Passive Voice

A few activities for practising the passive voice.

There is / are & Quantifiers

Includes Kim’s game, what’s in the fridge? and describing a common room.

Conditionals

Activities for practising all the conditionals including superstitions, Murphy’s law, regrets, class surveys and complete the sentence.

Comparatives and Superlatives

Activities include pair comparisons and adjective dice games.

Reported Speech

Includes the crazy questions activity.

Tag Questions

Activities for practising tag questions.

Other Grammar Games & Activities

Board games

A selection of board games to give students practice of using various tenses and other structures.

Crosswords

Crosswords can be used to test your students’ knowledge of verb forms.

Four in a row

A printable three-person game in which students compete to join up four suitable answers.

Grammar photosets

In our Teaching with Technology section, you can find some photosets which help to illustrate some different grammar points.

Lying games

Deceit can be so much fun.

Find someone who …

An extremely useful and flexible mingling activity. A great way to get students up on their feet and talking to their classmates. Works as the perfect, first lesson ice breaker.

Tic Tac Toe

A quick and easy way to review various grammatical structures including irregular verbs, adverbs and verbs which are followed by infinitives or gerunds.

Preposition constructions
This activity gets students using prepositions of position to copy their classmates’ creations. It’s more than worth the little bit of preparation and gathering of equipment that’s needed beforehand.