Paraphrasing is an important skill: If you can paraphrase, you can explain many things without needing to check in a dictionary, ask someone or silently feel unable to tell your thoughts.

This activity uses mother tongue (L1), so is not ideal for multilingual classes.

 Materials: lots of pieces of paper/ old bus cards; a bag; pens-pencils.  A partially sighted participant: all the words are written in thick black board maker. For a braille reader, old bus cards are ideal: after writing in board marker, the word is brailled on the same card. 

Each person thinks of a word they only know in their mother tongue.  Everyone writes each word on a paper.  If everyone writes 5 words, you rapidly get a collection of words to play with.  All words are collected in a bag, and players take out a paper: they can only speak English; others try to guess saying words in L1.  It gets very lively, and there is no need to prompt participants... who naturally start to express themselves in English.  It doesn't matter however many mistakes they make: the aim is getting information to their friends, in any English that works!  

NB: Thinking of words you only know in L1 can be challenging.  People need to think laterally, working out what words they don't know in English, but that they can explain in L1.  Once the first words have been found, many more are added to the collection.  

Follow up activity (http://accessenglish.org/content/view/77/36/)