In the final post of our series on making the most of general knowledge in the ELT classroom, our Unlock author Sabina Ostrowska shares another way of improving students’ general knowledge – quizzes!
Now we’ve all agreed that bringing general knowledge into the ELT classroom a) shouldn’t be a lecture and b) is important, I’d like to talk about another way to improve students’ general knowledge: the humble ‘pub quiz’.
I organised regular quizzes while teaching on a University foundation programme in the Gulf. We called them General Knowledge quizzes; a more culturally-appropriate and academic name, but essentially they ran along the same lines as the traditional British pub quiz – several rounds of general knowledge questions to be answered in teams.
To make the quiz experience different from a usual lesson, we would bring all the students from the same English level to the university auditorium. This stimulated a (friendly) cross-sectional rivalry. Each team of three or four students would come up with a team name; a fun prelude to the competition itself. Once the teams were ready, the Quizmaster would read the first question, and project it onto the big screen. Since the quiz was in an ELT context, we felt it important for the students to see the questions. We would also supplement the questions with visual cues. For example, for the question “In which century was Albert Einstein born?” the students would see the question and the picture of the scientist. Many questions were also based on visual cues like ‘What country’s flag is this?” or “In which city can you find this building?”. Other questions based on photos related to food from around the world, famous people, national costumes and dance, and famous monuments. After seeing and hearing the questions, the students were given one minute to discuss and write down their answers before the next question.
The questions were usually prepared by teachers to be used in this specific context. I don’t think that it’s possible (or useful) to just grab any old trivia test available online and bring it to your classroom. You’ll soon find out that the subject matter is completely unknown to the students (“Name all three members of Bananarama…?”). It may even result in a quiz where none of the competitors know the answers to any of the questions and the fun is over in minutes.
Given that students can’t be expected to name the members of Bananarama or know the capital of Togo offhand, the teachers who prepared the quiz would often use the students’ course books as a source of information. Most EAP coursebooks contain plenty of trivia in the reading and listening texts. In Unlock Listening and Speaking 3 for example, students learn about animals, customs and history. We pulled out questions like ‘What’s the national symbol of Japan?’, “Where is the Atacama Desert?”, “On which continent can you see savannahs?’ All these questions can be altered depending on the students’ language level. For lower-level students, we focused on visual cues and added multiple-choice answers. For higher-level students, the questions were more open-ended and required more writing.
Bringing a trivia quiz into an ELT classroom has two strong outcomes
1) It helps students learn about the world in a fun and collaborative way. It allows weak students to learn from more capable peers, and as I watched I saw students fervently discussing each question. The role of ‘leader’ would often change from question to question and each student was given the opportunity to share what they knew.
2) It helps students with language. It reinforces the spelling of different countries and nationalities, and teaches students when to use capital letters. Even at tertiary level this can still be problematic for students, particularly those who write using a different script. In the final stage of the game the teams would exchange their answer sheets and the Quizmaster would display each question again, this time with the correct answer visible on the slide. The teams would lose points for spelling errors and incorrect capitalization.
After a year of doing monthly quizzes, we had a huge bank of questions for the big end-of-year quiz and the concept had gained so much popularity that students had started preparing their own trivia quizzes to help each other prepare. Aside from increasing the students’ general knowledge and language skills, these quizzes had had a more unexpected effect. It had built a positive rapport between students and between students and their teachers. It nurtured the idea of sharing knowledge and it helped less linguistically adept students to gain confidence and take on leadership roles, particularly because the students who won were not always the best at English!