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Whether traditional flash cards or electronic flash cards is a great method to each ESL students. Flash cards are easy to make and very versatile. The following are five activities which teachers can easily use to teach in the classroom. It can be used for one on one class or in a group setting. 1. Drilling exercise. Teachers are use flash cards for pronunciation drilling exercise; whether is single phonetic tones or a word. Teachers can put the flash cards on the board and ask the students to pronounce the same phonetic or word. Teachers can move around the cards and have multiple rounds of practice. This is an easier method for students to memorize a tone or a sound. However, drilling exercise can be repetitive and a bit boring. Thus, teachers should add a bit of creativity to make it more interesting for the students. 2. Matching / Identifying exercise. This exercise can be used between teacher and students or arrange the students to be in pairs or in small groups. Teachers can draw a picture on the flash card and the corresponding vocabulary on another card. Students need to pair up the vocabulary and the picture accordingly. Teachers can time each pair or groups of students to see which team is the fastest. The picture on the flash cards help students to have a more visual stimulation and easier for students to remember. 3. Scavenger Hunt. Teachers can hide flash cards around the classroom and have the students to find all the cards inside the classroom. Then the students need to use the cards to make up a sentence or a phrase. This game can teach students on part of speech and sentence structure. Teachers can also put the students in team to see which team gets the correct answer first. Various games such as matching pictures with vocabularies can also be used. 4. Question and Answer. Many students use flash cards to study by putting the question on one side and the answer on the back. Teachers can have this kind of exercise with the class or classmates can pair up for this exercise too. The questions can be fill in the blank exercise on grammar such as preposition, pronouns or tenses. Moreover, teachers can have spelling exercise by using flash cards, students have to give the missing alphabet for each vocabulary. 5. Memory games. Memory games are commonly used for young students. Teachers just need to put the flash cards face down and have the students to find the same pair. The upside of the card can be a picture with the matching word underneath it. Teachers can also have exercise on homonym, antonym or synonyms using this method. The above are just simple activities that a teacher can use. Teachers may be creative and twist any traditional activity to make it more fun for students. As mentioned previously, electronic flash cards are getting more popular nowadays as well. However, this method minimizes the physical interaction among the students as it’s more for one on one teaching. Also, most students enjoy flipping over the cards themselves.
