Word-Sport Makes Its Classroom Debut

On Thursday, January 20, 2005, a very special competition of a new fast-paced word game took place. The game: Word-Sport. The place: the classroom of Mr. Phillip R. Chase, a teacher at Lee Middle School in Wyoming, Michigan. The competitors: a group of eager seventh graders whose mother tongue is Spanish, not English. The results: excellent practice developing English skills and non-stop fun.

Mr. Chase runs an ESL (English as a Second Language) classroom at the school. “I’m always on the lookout for any kind of teaching material or system that will get my students to be aware of spelling and the relationships between English words,” says Chase. Getting a handle on the many different aspects of the native language is essential for success in his class and in school in general, as these students need to acquire English so that they can join the mainstream classes offered at Lee. “When I met Mr. Mellerowicz at U-CON and saw Word-Sport, I knew that it was not only something that my students would like, but it was also something that would be a great classroom activity. The exciting action racing against the clock combined with the creativity of looking at your letter choices to come up with words really clicked.”

Phil Chase is himself a published game designer. Theophrastus, an intriguing game with Renaissance-era alchemy as its theme, came out in 2002. Since then, Chase has authored several more prototypes under consideration with different game companies. Chase has traditionally used his classroom as a platform for play-testing educational games, and Word-Sport was certainly no exception. Although Word-Sport was not originally intended for use as an educational game, its success in an ESL classroom is proof of its wide appeal to many different types of players.

Students were organized into two groups of five players. Following the Word-Sport official rules, students started with a set number of tiles, and organized these initial tiles into a crossword design of words while the clock was running. When a player had successfully used all of his or her tiles, he or she shouted “Go!” and each player took a new tile from the remaining ones in the center of the table. A winner was declared when all the letter tiles were taken and he or she was able to use all of his or her tiles. Competition was fierce as each student scrambled to impress Mr. Chase with their clever words, either working off existing words in horizontal or vertical branches, and starting new crossword arrangements when necessary. One student even managed to get bonus points by containing all of his words in a single crossword grid. When students realized that there was several different ways of obtaining bonus points, their competition was driven into an even higher gear. A timekeeper recorded the finishing times as students completed their crosswords, and students seemed to enjoy the idea of trying to improve on their own best times.

As a game with fast action and the thrill of competition, Word-Sport ranks high. Yet even more interesting is Word-Sport’s educational value, as Chase was pleased to discover. “You never know exactly at what level a Spanish-speaking student is at with their English spelling,” explains Chase, in his eleventh year of his teaching career. “So anything you can do to test their judgment of correct spelling, to show them new letter combinations, and to practice their consonant blends and vowel diphthongs, is very welcome. Spelling has traditionally never enjoyed being at the forefront of a language arts curriculum, but games like Word-Sport end up filling an invisible role. They unite good, clean word fun with English spelling concepts. You get a valuable exercise challenging students’ language abilities—without the groans!”

Chase happily reports that as soon as the students reconvened after the weekend, they quickly requested to play Word-Sport again. Chase is currently designing ways in which Word-Sport can be used as an assessment tool as well as a classroom activity. “Imagine that their spelling tests asked them to combine a set number of Word-Sport tiles into their current English vocabulary words. I might never give a pencil-and-paper spelling test again!”