It’s Fun to Learn!: Using Games To Teach Language

by Duncan Insuik

Middle School Spanish Teacher

When I began taking language classes as a seventh grader, it was fun because my brain genuinely enjoyed learning a new way of communication and expression. It was not the verb conjugations, vocabulary memorization, or cultural explorations that I relished; it was the fact that I was learning something new and different. 

That is not the case for most people.

When I began teaching Spanish, I quickly realized that I was in the minority of language learners. At the first schools where I taught, my mentors urged me to ponder the question, “What did your own language teachers do to make learning engaging?” 

But because my own brain had absorbed Spanish so naturally, this was a question I really couldn’t answer. So when teaching Upper School students for the first three years of my career, I found myself struggling to keep my students authentically engaged, and I almost began to feel as if I weren’t meant to teach.

Man in the Middle

Then along came Kingswood Oxford. I had applied to the school for an Upper School Spanish position, but the language department gently nudged me toward the Middle School. I was hesitant, thinking to myself, “I could never do middle school.” But, for a variety of reasons, I needed to transition away from my previous institution, so when KO called in July 2020 – in the middle of a global pandemic – I took the leap.

When I began my first Middle School class by counting to 10 in Spanish, the room of sixth-grade students erupted with the biggest cheer of excitement I had ever heard as a teacher. With a wide smile (hidden by a Covid-19 mask, of course), I took a deep breath and thought, “This is me.”

Putting the Fun in Fundamentals

Leveraging middle schoolers’ energy, curiosity, and genuine love of learning has been at the core of my teaching philosophy ever since: Learning is fun! But this mantra can be challenging to follow because much of early language training focuses on foundational skill-building: vocabulary memorization, verb conjugation, and basic sentence structure.

How do we make these rudimentary tasks engaging and enjoyable? If you’ve ever taken a language course, you probably studied a million flashcards, completed hundreds of fill-in-the-blank worksheets, and written paragraph after paragraph. My goal was to transform these mundane exercises into fun and competitive activities. These include:

• Vocabulary: Innovative tools such as Blooket, Gimkit, Bingo, Quizlet Live!, and Memory Match have turned flashcards into a far more dynamic experience than ever before. All these activities include a competitive element that draws in even the quietest student, increasing the motivation to learn new words.

• Verb conjugations: Activities such as Battleship, TicTacToe, classic board games, and dice-rolling games provide the necessary repetitions for acquisition while also allowing students to have fun, compete in a low-to-no-stakes environment, and experience some spontaneity in their language output. These dynamic contests are so much fun that students don’t even realize that they’re practicing the same task repeatedly.

• Sentence Structure: Once students have experienced enough isolated repetitions of a given subject, I’ll introduce games that ask students to apply the topic to a natural context. One favorite of mine (and of my students!) is “Wheel of Spanish!,” an activity that challenges students to guess letters based on the context and topic to uncover a phrase or sentence (a la “Wheel of Fortune”). This forces students not only to think about the topic they’re learning at the moment, but also to apply logic and their already acquired knowledge of Spanish to a new situation. 

Falling in Love With Learning

Put simply, my goal is to produce students who want to keep learning Spanish. While it’s unrealistic to expect middle-school students to attain complete proficiency in foundational skills, I want each of my students to walk into their upper-school Spanish class with the open mindset required to master those skills. 

Students don’t always need to enjoy what they are learning; they just need to enjoy that they are learning. That was, after all, the exhilarating experience that inspired me.