Jeopardy

Setup

With more advanced students, you could use the original gameplay format where the players have to make questions when answering. Most of the time however, you will just want to preserve the category and point-scoring format and use traditional questions.

You will need to prepare a set of twenty five questions according to your target language. You need five categories and five questions in each category.

Each question in a category will be worth one, two, three, four or five hundred points, with the difficulty corresponding to the number of points on offer.

If you have a projector and Internet connection, try using one of our pre-prepared Jeopardy games, listed under the Target Language section. These use JeopardyLabs, which you could also use to prepare your own games.

Otherwise, simply prepare the questions as a list to read out as needed. Draw the categories/questions grid on the board and cross off question tiles when they have been used.

In class, divide the students into two teams.

Game

1. The teams take turns selecting a category and question value.
2. Show/read out the corresponding question to the team, who confer and agree upon an answer. With large teams, students could take turns selecting and answering questions instead.
3. If the answer is correct, the points value is added to the team’s score. If not, no points are added.
4. The team with the most points when all the questions have been answered wins.

It is also possible to add more complex scoring rules. For example players could have the option to double the amount of points from the next question, but lose that amount if the answer is incorrect.

Target Language

The Jeopardy ESL game is extremely useful because you can change the questions to suit any target language. It works great as a review game the class before a test.

As it is so adaptable, you can play Jeopardy with any level of student, beginner, intermediate or advanced.

Click on one of the links below to view our pre-prepared games:

Jeopardy games coming soon!