Speaking activities are essential for English language speaking classes. However, designing the right speaking activity for a topic is not always an easy task. Teachers need to be aware of the students’ abilities and personalities as well as the language and grammar they will be presenting. It’s good to be able to run through or think through a list of teaching possibilities before preparing a class. Below I offer some essential speaking activities that have helped make seemingly difficult teaching challenges a lot!
1. Short Talks
Create a stack of topic cards for your students, so that each student will have their own card.
Each student draws their card, and then you assign them a time limit—this limit may be one minute initially, or maybe three minutes when they have had practice. This is the amount of time that they’ll have to speak about their given topic.
Now, give the students a good chunk of time to gather their thoughts. You may want to give them anywhere from five minutes to half an hour for this preparation stage. You can let them write down three to five sentences on a flashcard to remind them of the direction they’ll take in the course of their talk.
To keep listening students focused, you could create an instant “Bingo” game. The class is told the topic and asked to write down five words that they might expect to hear (other than common words such as articles, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs). They listen for those words, crossing them off as they hear them and politely raising a hand if they hear all five.
2. Show and Tell
Students can be asked to bring to school an object to show and tell about. This is lots of fun because students will often bring in something that’s meaningful to them or which gives them pride. That means they’ll have plenty to talk about! Encourage students to ask questions about each other’s objects.
Instead of having students bring their own objects, you could provide an object of your own and ask them to try to explain what they think it is and what its purpose is. Another option is to bring in pictures for them to talk about. This could be discussed with a partner or in a group, before presenting ideas in front of the whole class.
Generate a stronger discussion and keep things flowing by asking students open-ended questions.
3. Bingo
Many people think of this game as a listening activity, but it can very quickly become a speaking activity.
There are a number of ESL websites that will allow you to quickly create a set of Bingo cards containing up to 25 words, phrases or even whole sentences. They’ll allow you to make as many unique cards as you need to distribute a different card to each student in class. Each card can contain the same set of words arranged differently, or you can choose to have more or less than 25 items involved.
Rather than having students mark up their cards, you can give them markers (such as stones or sunflower seeds) to place on each square as they recognize it. This way the markers can be removed and the game can be repeated.
For the first round, the teacher should “call” the game. The first student to get five markers in a row in any direction shouts out “Bingo!” Then you should have this student read out every item in their winning row.
The winner is congratulated and then rewarded by becoming the next Caller. This is a great speaking opportunity. Everyone removes their markers and the game starts again. Every expression that’s called tends to be repeated quietly by everyone in the room, and by the end of a session, everyone can say all of the expressions on the card.
4. Two Texts
This challenging task is great for more capable students and it involves reading. Having texts in front of them can make adult students feel more supported.
Choose two short texts and print them out. Print enough of each text for half of the class. Create a list of simple questions for each text and print out the same quantity.
Divide the class into two groups and hand out the texts. Hang onto the question sheets for later. One group gets one text, the second group gets the other text. The texts can be about related topics (or not).
Group members then read their texts and are free to talk about them within their group, making sure they all understand everything. After five minutes or so, take the papers away.
· Each student is paired with someone from the other group. Each student must tell their partner everything they learned from their text. Then they must listen to (and remember) what the other student tells them about their group’s text.
· Students return to their original groups and are given a list of questions about their original text.
· Students are paired again, this time with a different person from the other group. Each student must test their partner using the questions about the text—which their partner never read and was only told about. Likewise, the students quizzing their partners must answer questions about the text they were told about.
Another day use two different texts and try this activity again. Students do remarkably better the second time!
5. Surveys and Interviews
Becoming competent at asking and answering questions is invaluable in language learning.
In the simplest form of classroom survey practice the teacher hands out ready-made questions—maybe 3 for each student—around a topic that is being studied.
For example, let’s say the topic is food. Each student could be given the same questions, or there could be several different sets of questions such as questions about favorite foods, fast foods, breakfasts, restaurants, ethnic foods, home-style cooking, etc.
Then each student partners with several others (however many the teacher requires), one-by-one and asks them the questions on the paper. In each interaction, the student asking the questions will note down the responses from their peers.
At the end of the session, students may be asked to stand up and summarize what they found out from their survey.
6. Taboo
In this game, one player has a card listing four words:
· The first word is the secret word. The aim of the game is to get another player to say this word. The student with the card will need to describe this word until another student figures out what the secret word is.
· The other three words are the most obvious words that you might use to explain the secret word. They are all “taboo” and cannot be used in the student’s description of the secret word.
This game can be played between two teams. It can also be played between partners.
You can create your own sets of words based on what you’ve been studying, or you can find sets in your textbook and on the internet.
7. Discuss and Debate
More mature students can discuss and debate issues with a partner. They can even be told which side of the argument they should each try to promote. This could be a precursor to a full-blown classroom debate.
Working with a partner or small group first gives them an opportunity to develop and practice the necessary vocabulary to speak confidently in a larger forum.
8. I Like People
Adults do like to have fun, as long as they aren’t made to feel or look stupid. This is a brilliant game for helping them think quickly and speak more fluent English (rather than trying to translate from their native tongue).
1. Students sit on chairs in a circle, leaving a space in the circle for the teacher to stand.
2. First, they’re asked to listen to statements that the teacher makes and stand if it applies to them, such as: “I like people who are wearing black shoes,” “I like people who have long hair,” etc.
3. Next, the teacher asks standing students to change places with someone else who’s standing.
4. Now it becomes a game. The teacher makes a statement, students referred to must stand and quickly swap places. When the students move around, the teacher quickly sits in someone’s spot, forcing them to become the teacher.
5. The students quickly get into the swing of this game. Generally, they’ll quickly notice a “cheating” classmate who hasn’t stood up when they should have, and they’ll also eagerly encourage a shy student who finds himself standing in the gap with no ideas.
This game has no natural ending, so keep an eye on the mood of the students as they play. They may start to run out of ideas, making the game lag. Quickly stand and place yourself back into the teacher position and debrief (talk with them about how they felt about the game).
9. Secret Zombie
This is a fun conversation activity that, although they talk in pairs, involves the whole class!
The scenario is that a virus has attacked the world and everybody is turning into a zombie! The virus is contagious – it affects everyone it touches – and students have to reach the safe zone before it’s too late!
First, prepare some strips of paper with either Z or H which stand for zombie or human; then let students pick their role. They shouldn’t let anyone know.
Students will go around the classroom asking and answering questions. After they have asked and answered, they will shake hands. The zombie will infect the other student by secretly scratching the inside part of the other student’s hands.
If a student shakes 5 people’s hands without getting infected, he/she enter the safe area and humans will win the game! Otherwise, zombies will take over the world! This is surely one of those speaking activities that students will have fun doing!
10. Missing Dialogues
This is a drill conversation activity where you pair your students up to practice the dialogue you show on the screen. Simply show your slide and have students read out loud. After two rounds, you will start deleting words in the dialogue and replace it with blanks. Do this in sequence until the entire dialogue is just a series of blanks.
You get the idea, right? You can also see these 3 beginner sample dialogues on PowerPoint then you can go ahead and create your own missing dialogues based on your lessons! This speaking drill is absolutely effective!
11. Picture Sequencing
In this story telling activity, students must put a series of pictures in order. They color the pictures and write descriptive words using adjectives, adverbs and expressions of time and sequence. When they finish, they go in front of the class to tell their story.
By doing picture sequencing before the speaking activity, students are able organize information and ideas efficiently thereby enhancing necessary skills such as reasoning and inferring.
12. Information Gap
In this activity, you will create two different versions of a dialogue and hand out version A to Student A and version B to Student B. The idea behind this is all the B section sentences that are missing on version A appear on version B; and vice versa.
Example:
Version A
Student A: How are you today?
Student B: _____________________!
Version B
Student A: ____________________?
Student B: I’m fine, thank you!
During the speaking task, students have to read out loud and listen to and write down sentences from the other student’s paper. You have to make sure though that students are really having a conversation and not just sharing and copying each other’s dialogues.
13. Conversation Cards
If you don’t want all your kids to have a conversation at the same time, then conversation cards is just the answer! In this speaking game, you will only have up to 10 to talk in front of the class per round. I usually use this activity when teaching positive/negative question or sentence but I think you can adapt this one to your lesson.
To do this speaking activity, you need to prepare cards that have conversation starter sentence or question, such as “What did you do last weekend?” or “Do you like watching cartoons?” and so on.
· To start the game, give 1 different card to 5 students and let them go in front.
· Tell the rest of the class to close their eyes or put their heads down.
· The 5 students you chose will quietly put their card on other students’ desks and then come back to the front.
· Tell the class to open their eyes.
· One by one, ask the student who has a card on their desk to stand in front of the student who they think has given them the card and read the prompt written on it aloud.
· (You can change this last part according to your prompts) If the card does not match the person who gave it, that person will give a negative response to the questionS or statement and the other student will go back to his/her desk.
· If the card matches that person, the person will say a positive response and the two people will switch places.
14. Discussions or Brainstorming
In groups, students share ideas, ask questions or find solution to an issue or problem that you give them. To make discussions work well, it is suggested to assign each member a specific role such as leader, time keeper, recorder, challenger, etc.
15. Role Plays
Students pretend they are in a different social setting taking on a different social role. To make role plays successful, it is important that students understand their role and the context of the situation. For example, students can be the waiter and the costumers in “In a Restaurant” role play, and so on.
16. Class Presentation or Reporting
There are many ways to do class reports in the classroom. Students can do a presentation about a project or you can provide opportunity for each student to teach the class about whatever topic that he/she is interested in. I did this activity, one student got to talk for 5 minutes before I started the lesson. My colleague called this activity as “Students Can Teach Too!”
Nguyen Thi Thuy Lan