ESL - Part of Speech Review Game - Stephen Birk

Hello everyone,
but a special hello to all my ESL teachers out there!

Today I will be sharing with you a little Part of Speech Review Game that I put together that works pretty well as a warm up and as a review.


The reason I created this game was because my students were not practicing their parts of speech. I wanted each of my students, at any level, to recognize what part of speech a word is because it plays a role in the syntax(word order/sentence structure) of English. Parts of speech are very useful when teaching how and where words go in English sentences.

Here you can find the links to my old Part of speech review games:

Part of Speech Review Game 1

Part of Speech Review Game 2

If you do not know how to use prezi, I would advise signing up for an account through this link
http://prezi.com/recommend/stephenbirk/
You need to have basic knowledge of prezi to manipulate this game.


Prezi is a very useful tool that doesn't require saving your work to a computer/usb. You can directly upload and work on all of your presentations online, so it's very effective for saving time.

Rules of the Game:

1. Each day everyone will get a chance to look at one word and guess the part of speech. 

-If you guess correctly, you get one point.
-If you guess incorrectly or guess more than once, you get zero points.
-If a classmate shouts out the answer for you or gives you the answer, you get zero points.

2. The whole class is working together but individually at the same time. Each person should study parts of speech individually and be ready to help the out the class by knowing your part. 

3. You take the number of days you have to teach and multiply it by the number of students you have in the class. 

Example:      20 days to teach. 10 students.

                      20 x 10 = 200 points (total maximum points the students could receive)

So I usually aim for about a 75% accuracy rate, because I know some students won't always study their parts of speech and sometimes they will not know the vocabulary so it essential to give them some leniency.

That means, if you choose 75%, you take 0.75 x 200 = 150. So the class needs to get 150 points in 20 days to reach their goal. That's an average of 7.5 points per day.

4. If the class gets X amount of points in Y amount of days, then the class will get a SPECIAL SURPRISE.

You need to determine your amount of points and amount of days for each individual class because it will vary. I usually just tell them they will get a special surprise and depending on how the class acts throughout the session, I will vary my surprises to match their behavior and attitude. I have made rice krispies treats in the past and also given out multiple suckers and raffled large candy. So really you can get creative as you want for the surprise, don't limit yourself to just items, you could take a field trip or something.

Instructions for teachers:

1. You need to make a template, maybe something like the examples I have created in the past. 

2. Each day needs to be filled with the same amount of words as there are students. ex. 14 students = 14 words.

3. Each day you will need to create a different direction in the Prezi. Just like microsoft power point, you go through slides in a particular order, in Prezi you can change the order of each slide, pretty easily. So each day you will have to change the order if you put all your words up first. (I usually make up the words each day so my students don't have a chance to go onto my public Prezi account and look up the words before class ;)

4. Start with different students each day and never go the same way around the room, this seems to keep them actively engaged when they don't have a monotonous cycle. 

5. Enjoy yourself. Create fun words or directly link your words from the vocabulary you are teaching in class. In any case, pick words that are relevant to your students' lives. If you are teaching adults, don't pick baby words (and also vice verse) .

I hope you enjoy and use the game I created. If you modify this game in anyway to make it better, please tell me! I would love to know. 

Additional resources:

http://prezi.com/user/stephenbirk/

This is a link to my public prezi account, there is a lot of different grammar topics that ESL teachers may be able to use for their class. Also feel free to share you ideas with me, I am always looking for new ways to teach my students :)