Play Well, Speak Well: Building Speaking Skills… Brick by Brick
Ms Estelle Bech is a Senior Lecturer in French and a course coordinator who has been teaching for nearly a decade at the Centre for Modern Languages at NTU. Her teaching journey began at Instituto Jean Piaget in Portugal and has since spanned across three continents and ten countries. As a strong believer in the power of play, Estelle integrates collaborative playful approaches, such as LEGO® Serious Play® and other hands-on, co-creative games, into education to unlock students’ hidden potential, trigger curiosity, and offer learning experiences that stay with students long after the classroom doors close.
Apprendre, c’est construire
When I started my very first lecturer position 25 years ago, I had the privilege of teaching at a Portuguese institute named after the renowned Swiss psychologist and pedagogue, Jean Piaget. For a young teacher in French as a Foreign Language living abroad, this amazing coincidence triggered my interest in this thinker, whose native language, like mine, was French. While I studied his ideas on how knowledge is built step by step through curiosity, play, and interaction, one sentence that sums up his philosophy—a key source of constructivist theory—recurred in my mind: ‘Apprendre, c’est construire’ (learning is building).
In language learning, construire translates into building core linguistic skills, like reading, speaking, listening, and writing, while also acquiring sociocultural competencies, such as intercultural awareness and adequate adaptation and adjustment to the targeted socio-cultural norms.
Both abilities can be nurtured thanks to life-like interactions, such as role-plays, performing micro or macro tasks in real life, also referred to as experiential play, or through playing games, whether repurposed from their original objectives or not. With these tools, students practise communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, and intercultural understanding in a motivating and engaging way, very much in the spirit described by Jean Piaget in his book La construction du réel chez l’enfant (1937).
At the heart of all these activities, one common word stands out: play. Play functions as a catalyst for making this “learning-by-building” approach effective by lowering emotional barriers and encouraging uninhibited participation. As linguist Stephen Krashen observed in Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (1982), students learn best when the “affective filter”, the fear of making mistakes, remains low. When the filter is high, students hesitate, withdraw, or fall silent. When it is lowered, they participate more freely and learn more authentically.
Fast forward 25 years, I am now teaching French level 1 at NTU after having taught across 3 continents. The same mantra still guides my teaching practices, and with it, the same universal challenge: what playful approach might help reduce performance anxiety?
Leg Godt – Laer godt
Around the same time Jean Piaget was publishing his influential books, a Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen started crafting simple wooden toys for his children. As his small business expanded, he asked his employees to suggest a name for the company. Out of this collective effort came a brilliant motto: Leg godt in Danish (“Play well” in English), later shortened to LEGO®. By the mid-1990s, LEGO® took its original leitmotif one “brick” further and promoted the LEGO ®Serious Play® (LSP) approach. At first, the idea sounded a little unexpected: what if assembling plastic bricks could be more than play? What if LEGO® could help adults unlock creativity, solve problems, and open minds? This serious method of “thinking with your hands” (The Making of Meaning » About LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®), promptly evolved into a serious pedagogical concept in Danish higher education. Leg godt – lær godt, which translates into Play Well, Learn Well, argues that play supports active, motivating and long-term learning. Educators acknowledge that play reduces inhibition and fosters verbal confidence. LEGO® bricks act as a language of their own, giving shape to thoughts that might otherwise be difficult to express in words… especially foreign words from a newly acquired language, where fear of mistakes can often block speech.
These evolutions lead me naturally to my NTU French classes, where LEGO® and language learning surprisingly overlap: LEGO® bricks give tangible form to abstract ideas, while French lessons aim to correctly shape communication skills. One builds structures, the other builds sentences, and both offer students ways to express, connect, and create brick by brick.
In French level 1 class, after just sixteen hours of class, NTU students start presenting their city, a topic where they are generally less talkative, show clearly less enthusiasm, and display less ownership than when speaking about themselves. Once students have discovered the vocabulary and basic grammar structures to describe urban spaces, reusing both in an authentic and engaging task developing speaking skills looks like a mission impossible.
But just like in the movies, my role is to accept it.
Play Well, Speak Well
To generate natural and spontaneous oral speech, I invite my students to co-build a utopic city or a dreamt neighbourhood with LEGO® bricks. This childlike activity appeals to students and teachers alike, as each co-creation opens a window onto the world of fantasy, values, and ideals hiding within each of us. As soon as the colourful LEGO® bricks are spilled across the tables, classmates become friends, the classroom becomes home or a playground, and the class finally becomes an authentic moment of real life, where students let their guard down.
The invented cities imagined by NTU students feature emblematic landmarks from their everyday lives or idyllic, almost stereotyped, settings: the Zouk nightclub, cosy coffee shops, or bakeries with crispy, fresh croissants. Yet, interestingly, they tend to omit prisons, at times schools, or even NTU! Into these miniature worlds, students place familiar characters: friends, celebrities, themselves, and even… me, their professor. This unique blended learning environment, where personal stories intersect with French cultural references, encourages students to fuse native and foreign languages spontaneously.
As I ask questions about the emerging wobbling constructions, uneven roads, and the minuscule Eiffel Tower or unrecognisable Merlion, an interlanguage begins to flow in much the same way. French words flourish within the familiar scaffold of English speech: “I need a rouge (red) brick to complete the hospital”, “we need deux (two) more”. Sometimes, entire sentences seem to short-circuit the brain’s usual English pathways: “Il y a un cinéma (there is a cinema) but no NTU”. Just like Roman orators relied on mnemonic pillars to recall their speeches, I notice that each LEGO® brick can potentially anchor vocabulary in memory.
On this theatre stage, catharsis embraces all oral skills as well. Pronunciation is not only practised but also experienced. Students dare to speak aloud unknown French words to describe their dreamscape. They naturally tend to repeat them confidently as they seek to be understood. By manipulating familiar objects, inhibitions, like shyness, fade away, leading the way to a more intuitive path towards fluency.
Grammar, simultaneously, often takes a back seat: the strength of interlanguage overrides accuracy, even though students still attempt to maintain some grammatical control. Their errors reveal their eagerness to build meaning and communicate over linguistic precision. They show that students are taking risks and demonstrate that an incorrect word gender is less a mistake than an indication of progress. And they teach students a gentle life lesson: we should always celebrate the effort or the attempt, and never penalise the error.
On n’arrête jamais d’apprendre.
Man lærer, så længe man lever.
You never stop learning.
At the end of a class, among laughter and scattered bricks, a quiet yet profound transformation had occurred: my students were speaking Frenglish. They had embraced the language, not out of obligation or for a good grade in their transcript, but because play had made it natural. A brick became a bridge: from scripted speech to spontaneous speech, from fear to fluency. Through interaction with and around LEGO® bricks, students unconsciously began to inhabit French.
While I believe that the LEGO® Serious Play® method can be adapted to any language and many subjects and is just one way to unlock the door, I can’t help but wonder: what is the LEGO® brick in other classrooms that makes students feel true ownership of their learning? After all, isn’t it a teacher’s ultimate goal to empower students with this feeling?
That day, as I closed the classroom door, I felt we had reached that milestone together.
My sincere thanks to David and Anna Sauvignon from Sorbonne Abu Dhabi University for introducing me to LEGO® Serious Play®, and to my Danish husband, who generously parted with his vintage LEGO sets for my NTU students.