Grammar Auction: For Grammar Lessons and for Writing

(TESOL Ideas--Any Grammar Point, Writing)

I've talked about grammar auctions a few times on this blog before, see for example here and here and here.  

To quote my own explanation from those previous posts:

Students are given a set amount of points (or fake money) and are instructed to buy as many correct sentences as they can.  (After the auction, correct sentences will be worth points, whereas incorrect sentences will be minus points).   The students bid with each other to buy the correct sentences at an auction. 

Of course grammar auctions are not my original idea.  In fact, they're an old TESOL classic that you can find in any TESOL activities list.

See, for example, the British Council.  I'll quote from their description of it as well just for reference:

* Put the students into pairs or small groups and give them the auction sheet.

* Ask the students to plan which sentences they are going to bid for.

* Conduct the auction, asking for bids on each sentence and selling to the highest bidder. You or the students need to keep track of how much money they have spent to make sure they don't overspend!

* After all the sentences are sold, go through them and get a class vote on which sentences are correct. Confirm the answers.

*Find out who managed to buy the most correct sentences.

* Ask pairs to correct the incorrect sentences.

So, that's the classic version.

Now, I have a small confession to make.  I've been able to make this activity work successfully in its classic form.

For one thing, it's confusing.  The game involves both money and points, and I frequently have difficulty getting the students to understand that the object of the game is to end up with the most points, not the most money.

Secondly, I have difficulty controlling the game.  Students frequently like to bid all their money on the first sentence, and then if they blow all their money of the first sentence, what are they going to do for the rest of the game?

I don't know.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong.  (Grammar auctions are a very well-known TESOL activity.  They should be workable, right?)  In the past, I've asked the other teachers in my school how they run grammar auctions, and the answer usually comes back that either they don't do it, or they adapt it.  

So... does anyone actually do grammar auctions in the classic form?  Or are they just something in the teaching training manuals that no one actually does in real life?  Or perhaps they work better with European students than with Asian students?  

In the past, I've tried to adapt grammar auctions by having the students bet on the sentences instead of auctioning the sentences.  So, for example, each team starts up to 10 points.  They are shown a sentence, and must decide if it is correct or incorrect, and place a bet.  (They can never bet more than the amount of points that they currently hold.)

This works moderately well.  It takes away the messy problem of dealing with the fake money, and if students bet and lose all their points, I loan them one point so that they can get back in the game.

But I still have one more problem, and that is the students often don't find the game challenging enough.  Or at least, the class as a whole doesn't find it challenging.  This is particularly true when I am doing just one grammar point in isolation. In every class, there are usually 4 or 5 students who are already confident with that grammar point, and can easily identify all the correct sentences.  (Because the game doesn't have a productive element to it, it's simply just about recognizing the correct pattern, and many students can do this very easily.)  So then the game falls apart because the class gets bored with it.

This third point is, of course, potentially manageable if you only use grammar auctions once you have identified a grammar point that is a genuine point of confusion.  That is, don't use grammar auctions as just a fun activity to spice up a normally scheduled grammar lesson.  Wait until you've identified a grammar point that is giving the students a lot of trouble.  And make sure that the problem is a comprehension issue, and not a production issue.  (i.e. it's not just a problem of forgetting the form during the heat of free conversation, rather it's that the students don't actually understand how the grammar works.)

In this case, a grammar auction might be useful.  

However, I find grammar auctions most useful as ways of giving feedback on student writing.

When I get some writing from my students, and I want to give them some sort of feedback on it, I go through each student's writing and pick out two sentences: one correct sentence, and one wrong sentence.  I put two sentences from each sentence on a word document.  The sentences are all anonymous, so that the class doesn't know whose sentences are whose.  (Although students will often choose to identify their sentences to the class during the game, but that's their choice.)  I mix the sentences all up so that the sentences are not in any sort of order, and that the correct and incorrect sentences of any given student are not next to each other.

This is a good way to balance positive feedback with corrective feedback, because for each student you are showcasing one wrong sentence, but you are also showcasing one positive example from their writing.  (Students will recognize their own sentences, even if they are presented anonymously.)

However, it's often the case that it's difficult to find a single flawless sentence in a student's writing, particularly if they are pushing themselves to express things beyond their current ability.  In that case, I might take a mostly good sentence, and then just correct it a little bit.  This is not ideal, because it is not as affirming as if I had picked a sentence that the student themselves had written, but often it's unavoidable.  And the hope is that the student might even notice the small correction I've put into the sentence, and perhaps take onboard the new grammar.

In my classes, I print out the worksheet with all the sentences on it.  Students first spend some time individually trying to decide which sentences are correct and which have mistakes on them.  Then, I put them in teams, and they check their answers as a team.

Then, we play the game as a class. I don't actually attempt to do an auction anymore.  Most recently, I've been running this game as just a simple "1 point per sentence" scoring system.  Students choose any sentence they like (the sentences are all numbered for ease of identification) and then identify if its correct or incorrect.  They get one point for simply identifying if its correct or incorrect.  If the sentence is incorrect, they can get a bonus point for then supplying the correction themselves.  It is thus advantageous for the teams to choose  the incorrect sentences, because they are potentially worth two points.