Teacher Discussion Forums

Is there any fun activity that i can teach the concept of "Tag Question" effectively?
Thank you

How about a variation on the yes/no game?
One student has to use the (correct) questions tags, and the others say a statement (let them be as wild with their imagination as decency and age permit!) and the "it" student then has to respond with the right tag.
If he/she fails to do so, let the rest of them challenge him/her! If they are right they are "it", if they are wrong- they're out? Of course, to hurry the game along a bit ANYONE who makes a mistake is out!
It could be a knockout competition, with the last two the winners!

Don't forget about intonation (not every tag has rising). To add to what itim's suggested, the student in the hot seat and coming up with the tag in response to a statement will likely be pretty preoccupied with just the form rather than the intonation (depends on his or her level, though), so it might well become necessary to pass the statement+tag back to the group (perhaps after the game has finished i.e. perhaps don't worry about intonation too much during it) for collective consideration regarding the possible/probable intonation(s) (this obviously will involve imagining the context(s)).

For example:

It's a beautiful day... V isn't it V (V= falling intonation; note the absece of a comma and question mark - see link below. Rising intonation higly unlikely/strange/unimaginable).
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... =4848#4848

You're 16... hot seat offers 'aren't you', someone in class suggests rising intonation thus: ^aren't you?!^. Hmm, maybe it's Roman Polanski having a panic attack about a girl he's with?

I like Sheep-Goats' idea of blanking out the dialogue in the speech bubbles of cartoons that the students have drawn:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/job/viewt ... p?p=210200

Like I said before, though, bear in mind that not all tags will have an intonation that can go either way, and in those cases where it might conceivably go either way, it's probably a good idea to not make the rising intonation too extreme (as I've argued elsewhere, I often think that falling intonation would work just as well for checking the truth of one's supposition - talk of % "surer" versus less sure can get a bit silly!).

Make up a set of dominoes, matching the sentence to the tag.

itim wrote:How about a variation on the yes/no game?
One student has to use the (correct) questions tags, and the others say a statement (let them be as wild with their imagination as decency and age permit!) and the "it" student then has to respond with the right tag.
If he/she fails to do so, let the rest of them challenge him/her! If they are right they are "it", if they are wrong- they're out? Of course, to hurry the game along a bit ANYONE who makes a mistake is out!
It could be a knockout competition, with the last two the winners!

What a wonderful idea! I'm going to try that in one of my classes next week!

Bye!

Sylvia