Name That Title is a simple game which can be used with intermediate levels and above (although with a little careful tweaking it can be used with all levels and abilities). It practices speaking and listening and is an ideal way to spend 10 minutes or so at the end of a lesson.

Preparation

Prepare a dozen or more slips of paper. On each one write the title of a well known book or play or film. The title should be known to your class and also be of the correct level in regards to its vocabulary. Ideally the title should be about 4 or 5 words long but certainly no shorter than two words.

Here’s a typical list which can be used for an intermediate level class of adults. When you write your list you must make sure your class will know all the titles.

• The Lord of the Rings
• The Dark Knight
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• The Merchant of Venice
• Pirates of the Caribbean

Fold the slips of paper and put them in a box.

Practice

A student comes to the front of the class and selects a title at random from the box. As teacher, check the title and write on the board one line for each word in the title then put in the common articles and prepositions.

If, for example, the student selected The Lord of the Rings, you would write on the board:

The _____ of the _____.

The object of the game is for the guessers to find the missing words and complete the title. To do this the rest of the class asks the student a random question and in the answer, the student must include the missing word. For example:

Guesser 1: For word 2, what did you do last night?

S: I read the new Harry Potter book: about how Lord Voldemort is trying to kill Harry.

Guesser 2: For word 4, what’s your favorite television program?

S: I like Sex and City. When Carrie rings all her friends and they meet up and go to a party and so on.

And so on until the class has worked out the missing words.

Notes

There are various ways to expand and develop this game.

• Don’t give away the prepositions and the articles to make guessing the title harder.
• Get the class into small groups to play if it is a big class or students are quite shy.
• Create some kind of scoring system and teams playing to guess the word.
• To make the game easier for the student, make sure the missing words are common ones which can be used easily in a sentence.