ESL/EFL/ESOL Teachers: Help Your Students Use REAL ENGLISH FOR GAMERS productively
Our YouTube channel and website have hundreds of videos to help English learners to improve their English through the video games they play. For the most part, our videos are not something you will need to use in class, but you can help your students get started using our content during their out-of-class gaming time.
In-class introduction
Your students are likely playing video games. Help them spend part of their playtime developing their language skills. This will take very little class time.
Sharing content
Your students can learn a lot of English outside of class. Help them share what they learn with your class as a whole. This video focuses on video games, but there are many other online English-language resources they can use in similar ways.
Language Hunting
Students who want to improve their English by watching popular video games should actively look for language they can use. This series of videos shows them how.
Becoming a skilled learner
Learning a second language successfully takes skill. Here are some examples of particularly useful skills.
Content you can use to supplement your classroom teaching
Add some interest to your grammar lessons with short video clips based on popular video games. I’ve had decades of experience teaching students whose native languages are very different from English, so this should be a useful change from traditional content.
Grammar Examples
Here are dozens of un examples you can use to liven up your grammar lessons, all taken from popular video games. Feel free to edit, taking single examples from each video.
Content you can recommend to your students
General Vocabulary
Obviously one of the big benefits of playing/watching video games in English is the vocabulary your students can learn. Here are words we have found in a wide variety of games. Notice the techniques we use to understand and use the new words.
Words for Gamers
One of the best sources of high-frequency gaming vocabulary you can find anyway, with easy explanations and supporting video clips
Listening Comprehension
Understanding your playing partners or the gamers you watch on YouTube or Twitch can be a big challenge. The language is unscripted (not planned in advance), it can be very fast and you will hear speakers from many different countries. Here are dozens of listening activities to get your students started.
Specific game-based content
We have videos to help you play many different games. They include hugely popular games like Minecraft, Fortnite, Among Us and Apex Legends, but many lesser-known games as well.
Words, Phrases and Sentences you can use
This series focuses on high-frequency language for particular games. We begin with Minecraft but will gradually add other games as well.
Individual videos to recommend
Here is a playlist of particularly interesting videos we have posted over the past few years.
Learn the Game
If you are familiar with a game and play it well, you don’t need to know a lot of English to play with English speakers. Here’s a fun example featuring a 9-year-old from Greece.
What should I say?
You are playing with friends in your own language – Thai in this case. No problem. All of a sudden an English speaker appears.
Small Talk
You get more than just gameplay when you watch video games. You’ll often hear some interesting conversations as well. Here are some examples
