What Is It?

In this activity, students guess a word based on a series of clues. The clues can be vague in order to promote more active thinking.

Preparation

Prepare a few examples of a series of clues that describe a noun using its collocations. Here is one: What is it? a. You can get it. b. You can have it. c. You can give it to someone else. d. You can catch it. e. You can fight it. (Answer: a cold)

When to Use It

• To give students practice or review of lexical items • To generate language for a production activity • To begin a discussion of collocations

Level

Skills

Practice

Procedure

1. Present, either as a handout, on the board, via projector, or orally, one or more examples for the students to figure out, either individually, in small groups, or as a class. 2. Individually or in small groups, ask students to come up with their own “What is it?” riddles. Then, they give the clues to another group/student to see if they/he/she can figure it out.

Variations Materials

If desired, a handout, chalkboard, or digital video projector

Preparation Time

5 minutes

Activity Time

10 minutes

1. You can tell students to only choose objects in the room or only abstract nouns, etc., depending on the level of the students. 2. If you anticipate that the students will have trouble picking a noun to use, you can put a number of objects in a bag beforehand. Students secretly choose an object. They then write their clues for this object. At the end, show all students the objects. 3. The activity can be used as a warm-up for story-writing about a noun. After activating a number of lexical items that “go with” their noun, they can write a story about it. Example: Last week, my cat had a cold. I think she caught it from the dog.