Murder mystery for EFL students

by PeteB
(China)

I teach English to Chinese students in China. The students are aged from 20-35 and we usually have about 30 students in the class.

I gave them a simple Murder mystery to solve and they loved it because it gave them the perfect opportunity to talk.

Role play is often too difficult because of the complex language used so we used simple defined role play "cards" that contained everything they needed to say.

There aren't many other suitable Murder Mysteries as most are either too complicated, or take too long (we need something that runs for about an hour)

Most of your mysteries are 2+ hours long. Can you suggest any which I could "adapt" for use with my students?

My response:

Unfortunately I'm at a bit of a loss as to where to begin - I can't quite work out how you turn a murder mystery game into a teaching aid in the way you describe.

Also, most of the games on this site are roleplaying games - so if your students aren't going to take on a role, I'm not sure how that would work.

However, what you might do is download the free copy of Way out West so that you can see the kind of games that I talk about on my site, and then you can go from there.

You can get the free Way out West by signing up to the Freeform Games newsletter, which you can do on their home page (top right).

Here's the link: www.freeformgames.com