Activity of the week - Grammar investigation!

A nice game to help students focus on common errors and improve accuracy. It's easy to set up and is also a lot of fun!

Materials
Just some paper!

Procedure
Tell the students about a crime that occurred the night before the lesson - a robbery at the school, for example. 

Explain that all the students are suspects, and they must investiagate to find the 3 culprits.
Give all the students a slip of paper.   You need to have written 'thief' or 'murderer' on three of them to signify the people who committed the specific crime. . Make sure the students don't  give the game away by revealing what is on their paper.  If it has nothing written on it, they are innocent.

The students then imagine what they were doing  last night and use the target language to explain it. The culprits must lie of course!

Target language which suits this activity includes:

Narrative tenses
Gerund and infinitive
Passives
3rd conditional

The culprits must intentionally include a small grammar mistake in their story. Something they think will be hard to recognise.

When the students have completed this task. They interview each other in pairs, listening for mistakes. The innocent students must identify the culprits by listening for the grammar errors. The culprits must avoid detection by trying to slip their errors in unnoticed.

At the end, the students work in pairs and try to identify all 3 culprits according to the particular mistake they used.


This game is great to encourage students to pay attention to common errors and accuracy.

Have fun!