ESL students can practice verb tenses interactively by playing hangman. The teacher writes a sentence on the board, omitting the verb, and tells the students what tense the verb should be. The teacher sets up a hangman game on the board beside the sentence, and the students guess letters until they have completed the missing word or the teacher has drawn a complete figure on the "gallows." This allows students to practice the construction and spelling of suffixes in the different verb tenses.
Songs, especially folk songs, often include lyrics with poor grammar. A teacher plays a song with grammatical errors for his class, then hands out lyric sheets. In groups or individually, the students identify the errors in the song and correct them. For example, in the song "Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles, students would identify the lyric "I ain't got nothing but love, babe" as incorrect English and correct it to "I haven't got anything but love," "I don't have anything but love" or "I have nothing but love." Students can then share their corrections with the rest of the class and discuss which new version is best.
A teacher writes ten sentences in correct English and another ten in flawed English, using errors common in her class. She divides her students into pairs and gives each of them a page containing the 20 sentences. She explains that the class is going to have an auction in which students will bid on sentences they believe to be grammatically correct. Each pair of students has $10,000 in imaginary money to spend at the auction. The teacher gives the students five to ten minutes to discuss how much they are willing to wager on a sentence being correct, and then conducts the auction. After "selling" each sentence, she tells the class whether or not it was correct and where the error was if it was incorrect.
This game for beginning English speakers reviews prepositions. A teacher divides his class into two teams and lines them up as if they were to run a relay race. He then gives the two students at the front of the lines a command including a preposition, for example "Put a book under the table." The two students race to accomplish the task. The student to correctly complete the task first scores a point for her team. The students go to the back of their line and the teacher gives a new command to the students now in front, and so on until all the students have had two turns.