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Oral questions (mainly yes/no) and short answers.

Procedure: One volunteer student stands in front of the class. The
rest fire questions at him or her, with the aim of eliciting the
answer 'yes' or 'no'. The volunteer has to try to answer the
questions truthfully without these words. This will mostly be
through the use of 'tag' answers such as 'I did' or 'She does not'. If
the volunteer does say the forbidden words, he or she is 'out' and
another is chosen. Give a time limit of one minute; if within that
time the volunteer has not said 'yes' or 'no', he or she has won.
Variation: The class is divided into two teams. A student from
team A answers questions from team B, until he or she says 'yes' or
'no'. Then it is the turn of someone from team B to answer team A.
Time each turn carefully. The winning team is the one whose
representative has lasted longer without pronouncing the forbidden
words!

English words in our language

Study of cognates or loan words from English in the students'
mother tongue.

Procedure: In pairs or small groups the students think of as many
words as they can in two minutes that they know were originally
English but are commonly used in their own language. Write up
all the words on the board. Alternatively, do the activity as a
competition and sec which group has the most words.
Obviously, this activity is easier to do if members of the
class share the same mother tongue, but it can still be done in
multi-lingual classes: groups are challenged to find English-origin
words that are used in all, or most of, their languages.

Note: This is a good morale booster for beginners or false
beginners: it demonstrates to them how many English words they
in fact know, even without advanced knowledge of the English
language itself.

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