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Every EFL teacher once faces the problem of students’ reluctance to speak in the classroom and getting them to use English can provide a considerable challenge. This happens due to numerous reasons such as a lack of confidence and motivation, students’ fear to make a mistake and expose themselves to the ridicule of the classmates, peer intimidation and lots of other personal and cultural reasons. But at the same time speaking skill is the most desirable aim of any student studying foreign language. And it’s impossible to build this skill without speaking practice. Thus the teacher should find ways to make their students interact and talk and whereas communicate with each other using English language and developing this complex skill. They need to give students right motivation and stimulate their speech. The best exercises that make students interact and talk are communicative games. A game is an activity that has a goal, rules and involves lots of fun. A goal and rules give right stimuli for students and fun involved provide good motivation. It’s very important for a game to be carefully prepared and well thought out beforehand. The teachers should set clear rules before the game. It’s crucial to explain behavior rules: to listen carefully to your classmates, not to interrupt them, correct other students’ mistakes only if teacher asks to do it, to be respectful to the different opinion, to help each other if necessary and some others. Simple communication games provide students with so called easy language. For example, on the elementary level students may play a game with cards. Students work in pairs and each student has a card with a picture of an animal. Students should guess the card asking “Have you got a wolf?” This simple language helps them to build confidence and believe the goal is easy to achieve. Games might be used almost at every stage of the lesson, on any level from elementary to proficiency and with adults as well as with children. Games are good to be used since the first lesson. They help to establish rapport between the class members, for example, using a board game with questions. Games might be good warm up activities that encourage students to speak and create good mood for the whole lesson. For example, there is a game when students form a circle and each takes a “name” from a list of words. One of the students stands in the centre and his task is to hit lightly with a rolled newspaper the head of the student whose “name” is called and the task of each student is to call any other “name” when they hear their own. This game can be used as a revision tool for vocabulary already learned or probably problem vocabulary difficult for pronunciation. Games can be used for improving every skill: reading, writing, listening or speaking and for activating grammar, vocabulary and improving pronunciation. But what is the most important about games is that all of them make students interact and thus improve their speaking skills at every stage of the lesson. Carefully prepared and well thought out games used as much as possible at every lesson establish good rapport among all members of the studying process, create positive attitude to the lesson and the teacher among students, build confidence of each student, make studying process more creative, entertaining and easier for students. Thus students start studying and speaking English more enthusiastically.
