Detective Game - A fun English Teaching



A. The Detail of the Game.

Skills: Critical Thinking, and Problem Solving, Reading, Speaking, Listening.

Grammar: Past Continuous Tense and Past tenses.

Level: Pre-intermediate +

Age group: Teens/young adults

Class and Phase: First to Third Graders of Senior High School (X to XII) / Fase: E dan F

Materials: Character cards, worksheet

Time: +/- 50 minutes


B. Procedure of the Game.

Step One: The teacher needs to explain to the class that they will be playing a detective game. the class will be divided into several teams based on the number of the students in the classroom. Each team will at least consist of 7 to 10 members. Each of the member will have a character and one of them is the murderer.

Step Two: Show them a background of the case just to give them perspective on what kind of detective and mystery games that they will be working on.

  • Download the Slideshow (PPT) of the Background here.

  • Download the PDF of the Background here. 
Step Three: Hand the 7 member of the team the cards than contain necessary clues and distraction to working out for the mystery to solve. if the team consist of bigger number of the member, hand them the supplementary cards which consist of clues that are not important for the case. If the classroom consist of more than one team, than split them into several teams and play the games as the competitive games. which team solve the mystery first will be granted more point.
  • Download the Character Cards Here. 

Step Four: Inform to the classroom that the card of the characters will be given only within 1 minutes. an enough time for them to read and understand the character. Then, the characters card will be taken off the students' hand to stimulate their reading understanding and vocabulary vault.

Step Five: The teacher need to hand out the worksheets, let the teams know that they need to go around the team and collect the information about each of the members character. they need to take note of any relevant information during the data collection. The teams should go over motive, alibi and clue.

The teams should ask (in English) each characters about the name, where was he/she during the party, what was his/her relationship with Ms. McGowan, When did he/she meet Ms. Gowan, and what did he/she did when he/she heard the Ms. Mc Gowan's scream?
  • Download the Worksheets for the Team Here. 
Step Six: On this stage, the students need to go around the other member of the students to collect information. During this session, the teacher need to mind the students' language, Correct where necessary.

Step Seven: After the data were collected, the teacher need to have students sometimes to discuss on who is the murder using the information they have. Stimulate the students' discussion rather than guessing the killer directly. Remember, for the teacher, the aim of the activity is to stimulate the students speaking, reading and critical thinking. NOT to find the killer directly.

The Answer to the issue is downloadable here.  

This file is remain confidential, to avoid the answer is found by the students.
if you are a teacher, please contact me (through the below chat box) so I can open the access of the file for you.

What's Need to be Prepared

  • A Projector to Show the Background of the Mystery.
  • A Clue Card for every member of the team.
  • A Worksheet for each of the team.


Further Request.

If you have any request, or eager to share your worksheet, Resources, or any other ELT teaching related, please kindly be a contributor.

Thank you. 

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