ESL Lesson Plans

 My high school and adult ESL students LOVE Kahoot. It is good for fostering a little competition between students. I mostly use it in class to review vocabulary and grammar structures. I also use it for special holidays like Christmas or Halloween. Students can also download the app and play alone to review alone. ű

 The main restriction is that every student needs a mobile device or computer that is connected to the internet. In a smart classroom or with students who have data on their phones it is easy. But sometimes it doesn’t work because the technology isn’t working or adequate.

 Hmm, I’ve heard of Kahoot but never really tested it out extensively. It seems like a lot of work designing those quizzes/games but I guess I need to look into that. Thanks for the recommendation.

 Kahoot live (played in groups) always works great in class. Ss cooperate, are motivated, and have fun. Even a “boring” fill in the gaps grammar revision exercise becomes exciting 🙂

 I’ve already heard about this service, and really want to try it out. But I can’t imagine how to play it with the whole class (not every student has a device connected to the Internet). I’ll be thankful if you share your experience!!

 I liked Quizlet very much. But I didn’t understand if I have to pay. It seems to have an upgrade, but I’d like you to tell me if I can or not create lessons for free.

 Well, you can create sets and assign to classes or just make them publicly available with the free account. The paid teacher mode removes the limit of classes you can create and gives you some stats on how your students progress and their score. I think it’s quite useful as you can see what words and phrases you should revise with your students.

 When asked why they study English, most students will say it’s because they want to communicate. They might also want to find a better job, pass an exam or simply be better at English, but oral communication is what students usually put very high on their priority list. What is more, many foreign language students admit that the fact that they can speak a language they couldn’t speak, say, a year earlier, makes them feel extremely satisfied and keeps them motivated. Whether you teach low-level or advanced learners, use these five speaking fluency activities for ESL students to help them communicate better in English. You can use the activities as warm-ups, fillers, and whenever you feel that your students (and you!) need them.

 Used every day by people all over the world, small talk or a quick chat is a great way to practise fluency, revise and make students feel more confident about speaking English. It can be used with students on all levels and repeated regularly in different forms. You can simply ask your students how their weekend was, or how they’ve been, but you could also choose a couple of questions from the list below to make the classroom small talk more varied. Ask follow-up questions and encourage other students to do so, too.

 Visual aids are not only a great prompt for speaking, but they also make the lesson more interactive and engaging. Regardless of the students’ level, they are a valuable tool for practising speaking. There are numerous websites where you can generate random pictures (like here or here) and use them to make your students talk. Apart from the obvious ‘describe the picture’ part, use the set of questions below to make the task more interesting or more appropriate for high-level students. The questions work with any picture, and develop not only speaking fluency, but also the ability to think critically in English.

 Do you think your students could benefit from such speaking fluency activities? In this lesson for lower-level students you will find tasks to help with picture description, and at the end of this lesson for advanced students you will find sets of photos with extra questions.

 An oldie but a goodie. Everybody likes talking about their preferences, and as teachers we can use this fact to get our students talking. The rule here is that students must explain why they prefer something over something else, because that is when production happens. Use the examples below, and once your students get the gist of the activity, ask them to prepare more of the ‘Would you rather’ questions in pairs. Give them a theme: holidays, work, lifestyle, possessions, extremes, etc. They can then answer other students’ questions.

 This is one of the best speaking fluency activities for ESL students to use if your lower-level learners still don’t feel comfortable speaking English. The purpose is to let them have a simple conversation with a partner, without worrying about accuracy, and enjoy the fact that they are able to communicate in a foreign language. Put your students in pairs and tell them they will talk about a topic you give them for two minutes. Tell them the point is to keep the conversation going, and that they can say whatever comes into their mind. That means they can share their own opinions and experience, but also ask their partner questions. You, the teacher, want to hear them speak English and that’s all you ask.

 Some possible topics for the two-minute conversations include: weekends, food, films, pets, birthdays, shopping, family, cities, travelling, school. If you want to make it more interesting, choose some of these less obvious topics: carrots, socks, dolphins, dentists, headphones, windows, jars, islands, queues, coffee.

 This simple activity creates lots of opportunities for students to ask questions. The following are some examples of what you might say to your students about yourself. You can obviously adapt the sentences so that they are true for you.

 After hearing or reading one of your sentences, students talk in pairs or groups to establish if it is something you and they have in common. It probably isn’t, so they will get one minute to modify the statement so that it is true for the three of them. This will require either asking their partners questions (e.g. Where do you listen to music? Do you listen to classical music? Do you always listen to something in the car?), or talking about their own experience, e.g. of listening to music and going places by car, until the other students decide that it is also true for them. (There might be students who, once they realize a sentence is untrue for all of them, will simply turn it into a negative, or change the beginning to ‘My English teacher…’. Make sure they know that is not what the activity is about.)

 If you want your students to practise asking questions more, have a look at this lesson plan.Fluent speaking is arguably the most desirable skill for English learners. At ESL Brains, we always try to give it priority in the lessons we design, but it ultimately depends on you, the teacher, how much speaking practice your students are given. How do you create speaking opportunities in the lesson? Which of the no-prep speaking fluency activities for ESL students will you use to help your students communicate better in English?

 Thanks for the inspiration! It’s always nice to have a few fresh ideas, or even just a reminder to dust off some classic, well-loved activities too. 🙂

 I have a student who really struggles with any kind of conversation about herself. We often use photos of individuals and groups, and I ask leading questions about them. She has opened up tremendously, and I can now sneak in questions about her, as well. She’s really responding well to this.

ESL Lessons

 These five ESL speaking games are simple and fun. They provide speaking practice and can be used as fillers, vocabulary revision tasks or a set of games to be played in the last lesson in the semester. You can create them yourself or use our ready-made lower-level (A2-B1) and higher-level (B2-C1) guessing games lesson plans.

 Of the ESL speaking games described here, this one is probably the one you should start with. It is a simpler version of the game Taboo. It can be played in pairs or teams. A student gets a word and needs to give others clues so that they guess it. They cannot, however, use the word in question or any of its parts. They cannot use any words that rhyme with the target word either. Students have one minute to describe as many words as possible for their partner, team or the whole group to guess correctly. Students might want to see how NOT to play the game in this video (up to 00:28). If your students like to compete, you can award them points for every correctly guessed word.

 This game is fun, loud and super engaging. Your students might get very creative as their answers will be considered correct as long as other students agree they are. A student gets a category and has five seconds to come up with three things that fall into it. For example, they might need to name three things people have for breakfast. Some will give simple answers, like cereal, coffee and toast, in which case they get a point (although scores are not that important in the game – students are likely to just want to play it for fun). The challenge, however, is that five seconds is not a lot of time. So a student might fail to come up with obvious things and say whatever comes to mind, like carrot, snack and water, just to say something within the five seconds. Now is the time when other students either accept the answers or not. If they don’t, or if the student fails to provide three answers, the person sitting on their right (or the one whose turn comes after) tries to come up with three new things that fall into the category. If they manage to do that, they get a point. Otherwise the following student gets a different category.

 It’s quite important to use a sound to mark the end of the five seconds. You can use a simple timer. Make sure that you start the timer after you have finished reading the category.

 This is one of the ESL speaking games that gives students an opportunity to not only speak but also practise question formation. In the game, a student gets a word and others can ask any 20 yes or no questions to guess what the word is. The questions can be as simple as Is it a type of food? to more elaborate ones like Is it something people usually keep in the fridge? or Is it bigger than a fork? For lower-level students, the words could be limited to objects but higher-level students could also use places, ideas or people. This game doesn’t require much preparation and, after seeing some examples, your students can be the ones who come up with the words to guess.

 This fun guessing game is also great grammar practice. A student gets a verb that others need to guess by asking questions and using the word coffeepot as a substitute for the verb. So they might ask: Do people coffeepot every day?, Have we coffeepotted in this lesson?, Are you coffeepotting now?, Is coffeepotting something people do on purpose? or Is coffeepotting dangerous? The answers don’t need to be limited to just yes or no, so the answering student can explain that it could be dangerous but people do it regularly and no one gets hurt. Students can also ask open-ended questions like In what situations do people coffeepot? or Why do people coffeepot every day? The answering student may decide to provide more or less help to other students by giving them responses with varying levels of detail. The verbs that work best in this game are those that refer to what people (or animals) do and that are intransitive (e.g. it is fairly easy to guess the verb swim but not necessarily the verb use).

 This is one of the funniest ESL speaking games. Students guess a word based on one-word clues. The game is ideally played in groups of four, with two pairs in each group. One person in each pair gets the same word and they need to help their partners guess the word by giving them one-word clues. The game might go like this: students A and B get a word (e.g. roses). Student A gives the first clue to their partner (e.g. red) while the other pair listens. Student A’s partner tries to guess the word but fails (e.g. they say light). Now student B gives a one-word clue to their partner (e.g. dozen) while the other pair listens. Their partner says eggs, which means that it is student A’s turn again. The clues follow until one of the partners guesses the word. You can see (and show your students) how the game is played in this video (00:56-02:18).

 Alternatively, the game can be played in pairs, in which case students could be limited to using only two or three words to help their partners guess the ‘password’. It could also be played in threes: two students might give clues to one person.