24 Tic-Tac-Toe

Select some sentences from students’ writings or speaking that you believe they are able to fix by themselves. We suggest that the number of sentences be 9, 16 or 25 so that you can construct a square grid (3 x 3; 4 x 4; 5 x 5). DO NOT include any information that could identify who made the mistake. Write all sentences (with the mistakes) on paper and distribute copies to all students. If you have a group of less proficient learners, you may choose to underline the incorrect word or phrase. Here is an example of 9 problem sentences from a group of elementary students.

• He’s live in Paris.
• She has 21 years old.
• Susan is married and she have 3 children.
• She no have a car.
• In your free time, she watches TV.
• Peter works in home.
• He don’t drive to work.
• She goes often to the shopping mall.
• They come home at 2 hours.

Place students in groups and tell them to try to find the mistakes and suggest a correction. You can have as many groups as you wish. In case there are more than 2 groups, we recommend using 16 or 25 sentences. You can either assign a specific period of time (5 minutes, for example) or start the game as soon as a group says “ready!” indicating that they have finished fixing the sentences and are ready to start. If the other groups have not finished revising and/or editing the sentences, they will have to do it during the game. This will prevent students from taking too long fixing the sentences.

Draw a grid on the board and write the numbers on each square. If you have 16 sentences, your grid will look like this:

Assign a symbol for each group (a circle, a triangle, an X, and a star, for example).

Groups take turns choosing a number of the corresponding sentence they will try to fix. If the group can fix the sentence, draw their symbol on that square. If the group can’t fix the sentence, just leave that square blank and go to the next group. You may give a clue (for example, “the word order is not correct” or “there is a word missing”).  The objective of the game is to connect 3 squares horizontally, vertically or diagonally. The group who does it first, wins. Alternatively, when you have 16×16 or 25×25 square grid, there’s a possibility of forming several connections. In that case, you can continue the game until there is no other possible way to connect three squares in a row. The group that is able to make the highest number of connections, wins.

After finishing the game, the teacher may take a moment to discuss the corrections.