Please, Sir, may I have some more (words)?
A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to be a guest speaker at the Chicago Toy & Game Fair Educators’ Forum. Quite why the organizers should have asked me remains a mystery (I suspect someone blundered with the mailing labels) but, when I turned up at the appointed hour, they were kind enough to hide their embarrassment and, instead of giving me the bum’s rush, actually allowed me to address the assembled group of Illinois educators.
If you were one of those educators (and I congratulate you on your ability to stifle yawns and glance meaningfully at your wrist watches) you will recall that I burbled on about brain growth, the generative effect thereon of an enriched and expanded vocabulary, and how wonderful games are to furthering this growth – see my other articles on this website. You will also recall that, during the Q&A session that followed my talk, I was asked a question by a particularly astute and (surprisingly) awake educator. His question was this: which games have been found actually to increase vocabulary?
Needless to say, I didn’t have a ready answer. Faced with a roomful of schoolteachers I was momentarily tempted to say that my dog had eaten my homework, but we Thomsons are made of sterner stuff. In situations like that, confidence is all (or, at least, it’s better than nothing), so I replied that I would look into the matter and get back to him. In order to facilitate this, the educator in question gave me his email address (which I promptly lost).
However, I did look into the matter, and the answer is this: there has been, as far as I can determine, absolutely no research on this subject. Which is, you will agree, not terribly helpful.
So, I have given the matter some thought. And, in the course of giving it some thought, I couldn’t help remembering something that occurred at a game convention at which I was exhibiting earlier this year. Our booth contained a number of game-play tables at which people could sit and actually play the games we were exhibiting and selling. As regular readers of this website will know, one of our games is AmuseAmaze – the spellbinding word race game. I shan’t bore you with the details of the game, but suffice to say that I found myself playing with a young man whose knowledge of 3 and 4 letter words can only be described as encyclopedic. Since he was, after all, a potential customer, I hesitated to challenge the first couple of words he spelled out – words that of which, quite frankly, I had never heard. The third time this happened, however, I could resist no longer.
“It’s definitely a word,” he said in reply to my gentle challenge. “I know because I’ve memorized every 3 and 4 letter word in the Scrabble dictionary.”
“But what,” I asked, “does it mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know that,” he replied. “I just memorize the words.”
With that (true) story in mind, I cannot with any kind of conscience, recommend any of the normal word/spelling games when it comes to expanding vocabulary. Scrabble, Upwords, even our own AmuseAmaze may be great games when it comes to reinforcing already learned vocabulary, but do they, alone and unaided by a curriculum guide, actually expand vocabulary? My young friend at the game convention might suggest not.
So, here are my (non-statistically proven) suggestions. Among board games, take a look at Articulate! It’s a British game produced by Drummond Park of Edinburgh, Scotland. Your challenge is to describe as many words as possible to your teammates in 30 seconds, without using the forbidden "rhymes with" or "sounds like" descriptions. I didn’t think it was available in the USA, but I found it on Amazon.com the other day as well as Boardgames.com. Also, I cannot recommend too highly Balderdash. Sure, it’s been around since the old king died, but there is probably no better and more fun way to expand your vocabulary. Plus, if your school budget doesn’t, in this economically strained times, run to buying ready-made games, the basic game play can be done with nothing more complicated than a decent dictionary opened at random pages and a few scraps of paper.
Finally, the following are a number of websites that, for nothing more than a few pennies-worth of electricity, might help when it comes to vocabulary building.
- Learning Vocabulary Fun: http://www.vocabulary.co.il/
- Vocabulary Games: http://www.gamequarium.com/evocabulary.html
- Academic Vocabulary: http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/vocab/
- Play Kids Games: http://www.playkidsgames.com/vocabularyGames.htm
- Vocabulary.com: http://www.vocabulary.com/
- Surfing the Net with Kids: http://www.surfnetkids.com/vocabulary_games.htm
- Manythings.org: http://www.manythings.org/vocabulary/
- Fun With Vocabulary Games: http://vocabulary.co.il/blog/learning_vocabulary/fun-with-vocabulary-games/
Can I go now, please, sir?
