12 Fun Agreeing and Disagreeing Activities

Stimulating presentation and practice activities of phrases for strong and weak agreement and disagreement

Although most students have no problem saying “I agree” and “I disagree”, they often have difficulties in understanding common phrases like “You took the words right out of my mouth” and “I can’t disagree with that” and in using language that expresses different levels of agreement and disagreement. This article explains some stimulating ways of presenting and practising phrases for strong and weak agreement and disagreement.

Agreement and disagreement numbers judging game

Students give opinions, listen to their partner’s reactions, maybe ask more about the reasons for their reactions, then judge where the reactions are on a scale like:

1. complete disagreement
2. very strong disagreement
3. strong disagreement
4. weak disagreement
5. on the fence
6. weak agreement
7. strong agreement
8. very strong agreement
9. complete agreement

Their partner then says if they think that number matches what they said, and changes their opinion if they think they said something too strong or too weak.

Agreeing and disagreeing simplest responses

Many English responses like “I couldn’t agree with you more” and “I partly agree” can seem to have the opposite of their real meaning, so it can be worth playing a game where students try to work out or remember their functions. Give each student a card saying “Agree” and a card saying “Disagree” and tell them to race to raise the right one depending on what they hear. These should be a mix of tricky phrases and simpler ones like “Definitely” and “I have a different point of view”. You could also include a few where both meanings are possible and so both cards can be raised.

After labelling the same phrases on a worksheet with A for agree or D for disagree, test them on their memory of the phrases with a brainstorming task, keywords to make the phrases from, etc.

Strong and weak agreement and disagreement simplest responses

Students listen to pairs of related phrases and show if they think the second one of the pair is stronger than the first one (e.g. “I don’t agree” then “I don’t agree at all”) or is weaker than the first one (e.g. “You are right” then “You are probably right”). After labelling the pairs of phrases W and S, test them on their memories of the phrases by getting them to make some phrases stronger and/ or weaker.

Longer agreement and disagreement phrases card games

A big problem with this topic is students repeating the same old short, boring agreement and disagreement phrases, as those phrases don’t often show how strong or weak their opinions are. This game aims to solve this. Students put split sentences together to form basic phrases like “I + agree”. They then add another card in the middle of each to make longer and more communicative ones like “I + partly/ totally/ ’m not sure that + agree”. The cards can then be dealt out and used in phrases that they say during a discussion.

Agreeing and disagreeing coin games

Students can flip a coin to see if they should agree with the next statement (heads) or disagree with the next thing that is said (tails), say something that they think their partner will agree with (heads) or try to get their partner to disagree with them (tails), and/ or react with how they really feel (heads) or with the opposite of their real reaction (tails).

Students could also flip a second time to decide between strong agreement or disagreement (heads) or weak agreement or disagreement (tails).

Agreeing and disagreeing dice games

The obvious use for a dice is to decide the level of agreement or disagreement, e.g.

1. strongly agree
2. weakly agree
3. sit on the fence
4. weakly disagree
5. strongly disagree
6. free choice

As with the coin games above, that could be the reaction that they should give, or the reaction that they should try to get from the other person with an opinion.

Dice could also be used to decide which of six roleplays they will take part in and/ or which of six people they will pretend to be in a roleplay discussion.

Agreeing and disagreeing bluffing games

As can be seen above, many agreeing and disagreeing games involve students not giving their real opinions. This can be turned into a bluffing game by the other person then guessing if their real opinions are the same as what they said or not, perhaps after follow-up questions on the views that they claimed to have. As well as playing a coin bluffing game or a dice bluffing game, students could give their true views only half of the time, only give one true view (out of five), only give one false response (out of three)

A more complex bluffing game is a version of the card game “Liar” in which students place cards saying “truly agree or disagree” and “not truly agree or disagree” face down on the table as they respond. People can then accuse each other of lying and the liar or false accuser has to take all the cards on that table at that point.

Agreeing and disagreeing roleplays

Situations which should bring up lots of agreeing and disagreeing include:

• business meetings, perhaps on tricky topics like downsizing
• public meetings, e.g. about a new bypass around a small town
• family meetings
• housemate meetings

If students are likely to be too nice to disagree with each other (enough), you can give them roles that mean they are unlikely to agree, or give them instructions on how they should respond such as always having to disagree initially then trying to agree by the end.

Agreeing and disagreeing keywords games

Students try to use keywords like “partially” and “but” as they respond to other people’s opinions, discarding those cards or crossing those words off as they do so. They can then try to write suitable phrases using each keyword and/ or put those keywords into gaps in example phrases.

Agreeing and disagreeing functions card game

If present (dis)agreement phrases in sub-categories like “strong disagreement” and “changing your mind/ conceding”, you can make cards with the names of those sub-categories on which students discard as they do those things in a discussion. To expand the range of language, you could tell them that they can’t discard the card if they repeat a phrase that has already been used during that discussion.