What is a barrier game?
A barrier game is a classroom game that gets children talking. There are many different types of barrier games, but they all have one thing in common: each child has information that the other child needs, and there is a barrier between them stopping them from seeing their partner’s solution. That’s why it’s called a barrier game. They boost confidence, grow vocabulary, and generate enthusiasm.
The only way across the barrier is to talk. Learners might be arranging picture cards on a coloured grid, guiding one another to draw matching pictures, or finding places in a town using a map. They might be absolute beginners with only a few words in English, or they might be much more advanced, and that’s the beauty of barrier games: they can be adapted for almost any language target and almost any level of learner.
