We teachers, especially we ESL teachers, spend a lot of time talking about compound nouns. In fact, I have quite a few activities that I use to practice them with my students (check this blog post for details). This is important, but I’ve noticed there is one particular type of compound noun that seems to trip up my students more than any other, the open compound noun. My students tend to think of them as two separate nouns, or as an adjective and a noun, rather than a single noun, and I can understand why they do! Open compound nouns are tricky because they look like two words, when in fact they are functioning as one. Now there is some discussion about open compound nouns: should they actually be closed or hyphenated? I am not here to settle these arguments, for my purposes I’ve let Merriam Webster’s Dictionary be the determining voice. If Merriam Webster’s Dictionary lists the noun as a single entry, and does not close or hyphenate it, I consider it an open compound noun. Here are some of the fun activities my students and I use to build our open compound noun vocabulary.
Dominoes
Played similarly to traditional dominoes, each student takes five dominoes and the rest are placed in a draw pile. The top card from the pile is turned over and placed in the center of the playing area. The first person tries to match one of his/her cards to the card in the middle of the playing area, lining up the ends to form an open compound noun. If he/she has a matching card, he/she plays it, and the second person then takes a turn. If he/she doesn’t have a match, he/she draws a domino, plays it if he/she can, or adds it to his/her hand if not. The first person to get rid of all of his/her dominoes is the winner.
An alternative, less competitive, way to use dominoes is to give a complete set to each pair or group of students. The students then work together to create a huge rectangle by matching all of the words to form open compound nouns.
The digital version of the game is played in a similar fashion, but students drag and drop their dominoes to make plays. You can watch how to play the digital version in this short video:
Memory
Played exactly like the popular children’s game, this open compound noun version is perfect for vocabulary practice. Students turn over two cards, trying to match the term to the picture. It’s a great way to introduce less proficient students to the concept of open compound nouns. The included 24 nouns are all relatively common ones and so students have the opportunity to expand their vocabularies while playing a very low stress game.
Taboo
This game uses the same 24 nouns as the others, but is more challenging linguistically. As in the popular card game, students have to describe the open compound noun without saying any of the words on the card. It’s a great speaking activity and one that my intermediate and advanced students really get into. When choosing the forbidden words, I tried to create a reasonable level of difficulty without making the game so challenging students wouldn’t want to play. It seems to have worked and my students have been known to ask to play the game again.
Spoons
Hands down the most popular and competitive game in my open compounds game repertoire is Spoons. If you are unfamiliar with the game, you can get all of the details in this blog post. The goal of the game is to collect an open compound noun triplicate (word one, word two, compound noun) and grab a spoon from the center of the table. That starts a spoon grab frenzy with the final person being left spoonless and gaining a letter. Once a person collects all of the letters in SPOONS, he/she is out of the game. The winner is the last person in the game. There is an alternate play version included that doesn’t involve grabbing and wrestling for spoons, but I rarely have students that want to play it. Those that do opt for the more sedate version usually end up quickly abandoning it once they see how much fun other groups are having.
While these activities don’t get quite as much use as my general compound word activities, I do use them much more frequently than I expected when I first made them. In fact, just this week, we were talking about word stress in my pronunciation class. All of the students are advanced English speakers, holding advanced degrees, and most work full time in professional jobs here in the USA. Yet, the minute they saw the open compound noun examples in the book, several hands shot up and they all wanted to know why there were two word examples in the single word stress section. Fully expecting this to happen, I simply smiled, explained what an open compound noun is, and pulled out Open Compound Noun Taboo. As I did the first word as an example, I was reminded once again of how deceptively difficult that game is! One thing I can absolutely say, the game, as is always the case with these games, was a success with my students. Happy teaching, everyone!
Here are those links again, in case you missed some:
Or get a bundle that has all four of the games (paper version of dominoes) at a 20% discount!
This bundle has all four of the open compound noun activities and six “regular” compound word activities.
The Gaming Grammarian 