This game is also one of my favourites.
Oreamnos, in your instructions above, you sort of forgot to mention that
when the loser of the RSP match goes to the back of his/her line, the next student on that team has to start making the rounds. I don't know if that point is obvious.
Anyway, just an anecdote: I once played with a group of beginners, all aged 8, and
heard one boy raise his voice above a whisper for the first time ever! And I had been teaching him for 10 months!. It's very exciting, I wish we could play this in my Korean classes right now, but we are all supposedly adults
.
I do wonder if the game's success in any way hinges on the fact that
Korean students respect the laws of RSP as though it were an ancient Art of Decision Making. RSP sure does
even out the playing field and allow even quieter students to make points in a speaking game. I just don't know if other cultures use it so much.
More thoughts: If the point of games (though it sounds better to call them "production activities") is to create a situation where students
produce language spontaneously, this is a really nice fill in
for the levels that are too low and at the same time too young to be able to think up sentences quickly on their own.
VARIATION: After the kids "get it", you can
open up the target language by allowing kids to generate opinions. For example, you put all the fruit cards down: bananas, oranges, apples, grapes..., and the kids can either say "I like bananas" or "I don't like bananas", giving true information. Now that I put it here, this tip may seem stupidly obvious.
