The most fun and intensive way of practising formality. If you like anything here and want more, please support TEFLtastic. 

An easy to organise and fun game  for all kinds of polite language. Students choose one of the rude sentences they are given (“Give me a pen” etc) and compete to make it more and more polite. Whenever they can’t make it more polite, the politest sentence gets one point and they move onto another sentence. It’s loads of fun because the rude versions are funny and the super polite versions are too!

At some point they can be given useful words to make sentence more polite (“mind”, “possibly”, “seem”, etc) and/ or super polite sentences to edit down, then they work together to write sensibly polite versions of all the rude sentences.

Some of the many possible worksheets using this idea:

Meetings language politeness competition game (in this bargain e-book)

Dealing with problems and complaints by email politeness competition (in this extremely affordable e-book)

Emailing politeness competition game (in this very cheap e-book)

Dealing with questions in presentations politeness competition game (in this cheap as chips e-book)

Ending presentations politeness competition game (in this absolute bargain e-book)

Starting presentations politeness competition game (in this great value e-book)

Body of a phone call politeness competition game (in this super affordable e-book)

Ending phone calls politeness competition game (in this penny a page e-book)

Getting through on the phone jigsaw texts (in this anyone-can-afford-it e-book)

Starting phone calls politeness competition game (in this well worth the price e-book)

Emails dealing with problems and complaints politeness competition game

Dealing with questions in presentations politeness competition game

Leading seminars and discussions politeness competition game

Ending presentations politeness competition game

Starting presentations politeness competition game

Turn taking politeness competition game

Telephoning politeness competition game

Responding to requests politeness competition game

Checking/ Clarifying politeness competition

Telephone and email politeness competition

Complaints politeness competition game

Teleconferencing politeness competition game

Meeting people politeness game

Page four of Saying no to enquiries

Market Leader Pre-Intermediate Unit 3 politeness competition game

Click on the TEFLtastic Classics tag for more than 50 very adaptable games like this, and here for more on formality/ politeness.

Updated 16 March 2023