Find the liar

A pack of playing cards is a handy item to keep in your bag. They’re good for
selecting random students for tasks and you can use them for a variety of quick and easy games too.
This very simple game is great for filling up ten minutes at the end of a class.

This game practices asking questions in a variety of tenses and forces students to be a bit inventive in
their thinking.

Take from the deck the same number of cards as there are students and make sure that one of the cards
is a Joker. Pass the cards around, each student takes one card without looking at the others.

Inform the students that if they now hold the joker, they cannot tell the truth, the other students must
tell the truth.

Going round the class, students take it in turns to ask any other student one question. What they ask
depends on their level and how well they know each other. Example questions might be:

 Do you like English? 

 Do you drive a red car?
 Did you enjoy your weekend with your parents-in-law?
 Have you lived in another country?
Focusing on open questions will make the activity more challenging.

 Where did you go for your holidays last year?

 What kind of music do you like?
 What’s your favourite food?
 Where do you live?
 How often do you go running?
If they think they have found the liar they can make a challenge, but if they are wrong they have to sit
out the rest of the round.

Sharper students might quickly identify a way to win. For example asking, are you a woman? Or are
you wearing shoes? It’s up to the teacher to make an arbitrary judgment as to whether a question is too
specific.
If the teacher takes part too, it generally adds to the fun. The game often descends into hysterics with
students struggling to keep a straight face when they get dealt the Joker.

To spice it up a bit, try adding a second Joker to the pack.

This is an enjoyable activity which introduces some film and storytelling vocabulary while
practicing use of the present simple in talking about films and books.

Write some present simple sentences describing the plot and setting of a well known film, for
example:

It’s set on a big ship

It takes place in the early 1900s
It’s about a rich girl and a poor boy who fall in love
Unfortunately, the ship sinks and the boy dies
At the end, the girl, who is now an old lady, revisits the scene of the tragedy

Students try to guess the film (not too difficult) and then in pairs or alone write some similar
sentences to describe their own choice of book or film. The class then tries to guess each
other’s choices.