The Odd One Out - An Old New Game

By J. Galpern, E. Lasevich, and A. Sokol

Age: any
Level of English: any
Duration: 15-20 min.

There seems to be little hope that we may find any new angle in an activity which has long been practiced by various language teaching professionals. And still we are sure that the way it is practiced in the thinking approach classroom will make your lessons more exciting for both you and your students.

The Odd One Out (offered in many modern textbooks) is simple to prepare and easy to implement in the classroom. You traditionally offer your students a list of four words (for example: a cat, a dog, a hamster, a wolf), three of which make one logical group (a cat, a dog, a hamster are all pets in our example) and the fourth is "the odd one" (a wolf). Students find the word and explain why it has been chosen (three pets contrasting a wild animal). We will now claim that with a little change this activity can be made much more challenging and be used for the development of thinking skills.

In our case the words chosen are:  a barber, a butcher, a teacher, a nurse. It's time to see four differences which make the activity a "thinking approach style".
 
Difference 1. The teacher chooses the word for the class to exclude. Let's try and exclude the word a barber. Easy? You have found that what makes it different is that a barber works only with men (a sex of a client he/she deals with), when others may have both men and women.
Difference 2. The teacher offers students to exclude every single word. Thus we find a reason why a teacher may be excluded (educational requirements - higher, when others do  not need it), then a nurse (word derivation - not by adding -er as the other words), a butcher (as the only one not exclusively dealing with humans).
Difference 3. The TA teacher uses definite thinking models (the ENV model in this case) underlying the activity and helps his/her students see and apply them, too. We see that any element (an element, E in the acronym, may be anything: a process, a thing, a person, etc.) can be described through the names of features (N in the acronym, such as: education, age, appearance, shape, etc). We can further compare elements, which are described through the same names of features. For example, it may seem hard to find similarities in the words a table and to crawl unless we come across the same name of feature, which is the number of letters in the word. The values of features (V in the acronym) under the same name may coincide or be very different. A teacher (E) will have higher (V) under the name of feature required education (N) while the other three will normally not have such a high requirement. 
Difference 4.  The TA teacher may choose to focus on process rather than on  result of the activity. Thus students are invited to offer their hypotheses and check if they work. For example, if the proposed explanation is "a teacher is different because of working with students", the teacher may suggest that students find the same value of feature  customer universal for the other three words. If students are not able to do it, they understand they have to reconsider their initial idea.

Thus from a very usual and rather unnoticed classroom activity we can get a very challenging exercise which lets us practice a wide range of communicative skills, as well as provides us with a rich material for teaching thinking skills.