Whole Wheat Games is an online gaming portal for language learning purposes targeting both business professionals and students as well as apprentices and vocational school students with an English level of B1-C1. The gaming portal consists of the opportunity to log on to a live session and on zoom simultaneously with up to 8 players and with one native English speaker who is also a trained ESL teacher. The games are designed to foster interaction, compel one to speak, and to promote vocabulary building, improvement of natural and authentic expressions, including ridding oneself of Germanisms (German-English false friends), and to maximize the kinesthetic learning potential through entertaining education. In people’s hectic business and student lives, furthermore, this option of online interaction serves to make the sessions more easily integrable into the workday. At a time when internet users have an all-time high in terms of access to authentic content for passive learning, active sessions with live moderation and assistance remain however limited, and none that I’m aware of specifically cater to German-speakers with their specific hang-ups with the language.

The backstory

I’ve been playing games with students in my lessons for over a decade and have modified games and come up with own in great volume. The pandemic hit and everyone got a little experience logging onto Zoom and saw that it’s harmless and features loads of benefits and it occurred to me that my long-time plans of producing my own games should simply be online rather than in-person! – the big benefit there being of course that I can edit the content with the click of a button and in so doing, expand on my vast collection of content aimed at helping clients hone their English skills up to the highest level. It’s been my experience that people in Austria, Germany and other places in Europe, for that matter, need more opportunity to practice their skills without necessarily having to engage in free speaking – where a few voices also tend to dominate – but neither in a setting where they have the option of remaining silent.. Active speaking practice also needs to be challenging and above all, affordable. This portal aims to do justice to all of those demands!

Some courage, consultation, and funding then transpired, and here we go! --- Whole Wheat Games was born!

By participating in one of our games, the microphone gets handed to you in a fun atmosphere where everyone has their turn at coming up with answers, questions, words, etc. The relaxed atmosphere of game fun allows more language learning to take place than otherwise would and even promotes better memory retention than, for example, by just reading a text to oneself or passively consuming Youtube content. In our setting, you have to say something, but since everyone has a turn, it’s all in good fun. With an experienced and native speaker English teacher moderating each game, participants are also encouraged to ask questions and readily receive good answers in terms of vocabulary, usage, explanation and/or plugging in of useful idiomatic phrases, etc. By consuming the bite-size content in game questions and situations as well, furthermore, your mind is better geared to be able to concentrate, zoom in on new words or phrases, and build up your vocabulary whilst having fun all the while. Kinesthetic learning experiences combined with Lady Toast = Whole Wheat Games fun!