English conversation activities

ESL Speaking Activity – I’m Fantastic

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Routine. It’s a useful classroom tool. It also brings boredom and unhappiness. That’s why routine needs to be broken from time to time.

That’s what this ESL speaking activity will do. Hopefully.

Fantasticats

This is an activity which I have shamelessly borrowed from a terrific business training website. Here is the link for business balls.

This conversation activity creates the conditions for a free speaking activity. With a few prompts the students will engage in an English conversation that does not rely on substitution drills or preset vocabulary.

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ESL Speaking Games – Vocabulary Lists

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Here is an ESL conversation activity that builds speaking, listening and thinking skills. If you learn all of the words, you will expand your vocabularyby 60-70 words.

ESL Speaking Activity

Print and cut a strip of words. Read the three words in a box. Your partner listens and thinks of two things. First, what is common for the three words. They are part of a category. Second, say one more word that is an example of that group.

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ESL Lesson – OECD Travel Data

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This lesson in the advanced level English textbook is about travel. So, I prepared a short lesson using OCED travel data.

The attached pdf has two pages of OCED travel data. We will use these pages as part of our lesson. It will help to build professional level speaking skills by understanding how to read, summarize and explain statistical data.

Speaking Activities

The first step is to understand the data you are looking at by answering three questions:

  1. what is it?
  2. what is being counted?

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Q and A with Prepositions

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Here is a quick ESL speaking activity. It helps students learn and remember how to use prepositions when making questions and answers.

How to Use this Pair Activity

Get students in pairs. One student reads a question and fills in the blank with the proper preposition. The other students makes a long answer.

When I do pair work activities like this, I also push my students to use Sentence Blocks. This idea is simple. One question becomes 3 questions. Every question is a prompt to build a mini dialogue.

That’s one way to extend the fluency building effect of simple activities like this one.

Question Prompts

  1. What do you worry ……. ?
  2. What talents are you envious ……. ?
  3. Are you superstitious ……. anything?
  4. What things in life are you most proud ……. ?
  5. Are you fluent …….any languages?
  6. What do you often dream ……. ?
  7. What people can you most often rely ……. ?
  8. What would you like to be famous ……. ?
  9. What do you sometimes complain ……. ?
  10. Is there anything you are afraid ……. ?