The game of ‘Circ’ - a language teaching activity
I just happened to stumble upon a game called Circ that can be used as a neat language learning activity.
Seems there was a guy named John Lighton Synge (actually a physicist and mathematician so I guess he was more than ‘just a guy’), who created this game. He was apparently intrigued by the fact that dictionaries use circular logic when defining many words. Don’t you hate that? You run across some word– I’ll use an example in Spanish since it’s the topic of the day– glotonería and say you don’t know what it means, so you look it up in your handy Larousse and it say ‘vicio del glotón‘, so now you have to look up ‘glotón’. I hated that even more when I was just learning Spanish and trying to use a ‘Spanish’ dictionary instead of a bilingual dictionary. But I digress.
This game Circ goes like this:
There are two players and each gets a copy of the same dictionary. Then the teacher or someone gives them the starting word (any word defined in the dict.) and they start. They have to look up the word, take on of the synonyms mentioned for the word, look up the synonym, take one of those synonyms and look it up… they keep going until they look up a word that has the original starting word listed as a synonym.
This could be really good for advanced EFL/ESL classes or foreign language classes, although I don’t know how many of the students would remember the words they looked up.
It sounds like so much fun, but I can’t play it because I have about 30 dictionaries, but only one copy of each. 
