Trying to fool someone in a friendly way is always fun and fertile ground for language practice. I’m Jo Gakonga from ELT-Training and this idea, called Liar Liar, is one of the many resources on the Twinkl ESL website.
This idea could be used with teenagers or adults and group sizes of 3-4 would be ideal. This could be face to face or in BORs if you’re online but it’s probably best to do a whole class demonstration to set it up, first. It’s a bit like the game show ‘Would I lie to you?’ if you’ve ever seen that. The idea is that one person gets asked a question of the ‘have you ever’ variety from one of the cards provided on the worksheet. These are things ranging from fairly innocuous like ‘Have you ever been to an island?’ to quite unusual ‘Have you ever eaten a worm?’
The person who’s being asked HAS to answer ‘yes I have’, whether this is true or not. It’s then the job of the others in the group to ask follow up questions to see whether or not they’re lying.
The worksheet has some sentence stem suggestions (when? Why? How many times? What …. Like?) and you might want to do a bit of revision of the structure of question forms before you start this.
You could specify how many questions they have to ask before they decide, or make it a time limit. Another great idea here is that if you have some more confident learners in the class, the ones who perhaps often dominate the conversations, you could make sure that there is one in each group and give them the job of coordinator or chairperson. This way, you make sure they feel valued and have a prominent role, without them being the one to ask all of the questions.
If you want the worksheet, you can download it on the link below and there are lots of other resources like this on the Twinkl website. Go and have a look around and see what else you can find!
