What kind of person are you?

I saw this activity in an Oxford resources for teacher’s book and tried it out with my MEC and advanced students, as well as my Japanese conversation student from the embassy here in the city. I remember seeing Sarah Walker presenting something similar to this at a Cultura Inglesa teachers seminar a while back too. The main idea is to give the students a list of questions and ask the students to consider the answer they would give for each one, and also to be able to say why they chose that particular answer. Of course, there are no correct answers and students will probably have many different reasons for the answers they have chosen. I used the *questions from the book and they were as follows:

1. Are you a tea person or a coffee person?
2. Are you a morning person or an afternoon person?
3. Are you an earth person or a fire person?
4. Are you a mountain person or a valley person?
5. Are you a jungle person or a city person?
6. Are you an indoor person or an outdoor person?
7. Are you a garden person or a forest person?
8. Are you a diary person or a knotted handkerchief person?
9. Are you a straight line person or a loops and curves person?
10. Are you a sight person or a sound person?

I asked the students to answer the questions depending on how they themselves understood the questions, reminding them that there was no correct or incorrect answers. After they told their answers and talked about why they had chosen each answer. Next, I asked the students to tell me what they thought each of the questions had meant. For example, they told me that the first questions could be asking if people were British or American, and the ninth question was asking if someone was conservative or someone more open-minded or radical. It was a lot of fun and got the students talking. I think that the questions could easily be changed for groups of lower level students, as there are no correct answers they would probably enjoy this activity a lot, depending on how much vocabulary they had

*Questions were taken from ‘Classroom Dynamics’ by Jill Hadfield, an excellent book full of group building acvitities