I don’t think I am sticking my neck out too much by saying that most ESL students enjoy speaking activities more than typical reading, writing and listening activities. Tending to be more dynamic, true to life and fun, a good speaking activity can really enhance an ESL student’s fluency and confidence.
Here, I am going to offer you a series of ESL speaking projects that you can adapt and use for your ESL students. Let’s go:
Infomercial Activities
This is one of my favorite speaking projects by far. Show students some typical adverts from a shopping channel; I like to show some of the funnier products just for giggles and to encourage students minds to wander, take a look at this compilation to see what I mean.
Next, I ask students usually in pairs to come up with their own completely original product to sell on an infomercial. If students struggle to come up with a completely new product you can suggest they add a new twist to arnold product, or make a new product based on a combination of two or more others.
For example, in the past I have had: microwave televisions, hair dryers that double as vacuum cleaners and laptops that double as portable stoves.
I tend to also do a language lesson based around the language of selling and persuasion so that when students make their infomercial they will send realistic and they often like to know some of the sales phrases, tactics and strategies that are used in real life.
Just for fun, you can tell students that they have a certain amount of money to spend and after they have seen all the infomercials they get to spend it. Sales can be recorded and you can see which idea/pair has made the most money and are the winner!
Presentations
Give students a presentation of a topic of your choosing, perhaps your own hobby and model the format and language that you want the students to use.
I tend to share slides with the student with the title of each slide already inserted. Students then have to fill the space with suitable information for that slide.
So, for example, if I wanted my students to present their own hobbies then I would probably have six slides titled with questions:
What is my favorite hobby? Why did I start this hobby? What have I achieved doing this hobby? Who do I do this hobby with? What will I do next in this hobby? Other interesting info about my hobby.
Students then fill the slides full of pictures that relate to the question and then they talk about these to the group and answer questions.
Some students always want to write out a script for a presentation which I let them do on the understanding that they can’t actually read it when they present. I allow them to write it out just so they can build up some confidence in what they are going to say and check the language accuracy of it.
I do usually place sentence starters and linking words on posters behind the audience so that the presenter always has some support if needs be.
Of course, this could also be done as a recorded video task. I sometimes ask students to record a voice over on top of the slides. This can then be converted into a video format for sharing later.
A few other simple presentation topic titles for ESL students that could be used are: My Best Friend, Who Am I?, My Pets, My Future Career, My Family, The Last Celebration I want to, Why I am a fan of __________ (insert name of whatever they are a fan of).
At this point you might also want to read one of my popular article about how to make your students speak English, here
Hot Seating
Become an expert – As it sounds. Students spent a certain amount of time researching a topic that either they choose or that is given to them. They are then to become that character and the rest of the group has to ask them questions to find out as much as they can about them in a set amount of time.
You can award points for correct questions being asked and for grammatically correct sentences in response. Personally I like to do this at the beginning of a new topic and direct students to research different famous people.
For example, if we are going to be covering the topic of Travel as in the IGCSE ESL then I have students research characters, such as: Dr Livingstone, Joe Simpson, Ernest Shackleton, Amelia Earhart, Ranulf Fiennes, and so on.
I often have students create a mini glossary for their characters as well which other students can refer to as they are quizzing the character.
This activity is best for intermediate level and above students and even then you may need to provide texts at a suitable level for students to be able to access, otherwise students end up on Wikipedia reading very difficult text.
You can have the group make notes and write summaries of each character for homework if you also wish to work on summary writing skills.
Recommended reading: 15 Research Projects For ESL Students
The Detective Game
For this activity you make up a crime that occurred in a given location, the more gruesome the better and if you can personalise it to your location and environment more the better.
Divide the group into smaller groups of three or four people and then ask them to create their alibis for the morning, afternoon, or evening in question. These people are the suspects.
One group, however, is assigned as being the investigators and they individually quiz different suspects one to one to try and find inconsistencies in their group’s stories. This forces each group to consider exactly what they were doing, where and with whom very carefully and in great detail.
After interviewing as many members of each group and making notes about inconsistencies between group members the investigators then confer with each other to decide upon which group’ alibi is the most inconsistent. This group are then sent to jail.
Whilst the investigators are discussing this, the suspects discuss which investigator was the best at questioning them and finding out the inconsistencies. The suspects will then announce who this person is, and they earn a promotion. Finally, the investigators announce the losing group which will go to prison.
This ‘game’ has got real legs and could go in so many different directions, so don’t be afraid to improvise and have fun with this one.
Drama Activities
Acting out a chapter of a book. Pretty much as it sounds. Read through a chapter of a book with students or have them read it for homework before letting groups act out the chapter, or a scene from it.
This works well even if they all act out the same scene as each group will learn from the last and the acting/performance and language should get increasingly better throughout. Alternatively arrange it so that each group acts out the following scene to the last group and so the full story is told.
Storyboard and act out the student’s own story. Rather than act out a book, you could have students plan out a story, or at least part of a story on a storyboard. This can give a greater sense of ownership, achievement and ‘buy in’ from the students.
What happened next. Read the opening of a book and as a ‘cliffhanger is reached’ pause and have students work together to act out the ending of the story or the next scene at least.
This also works well with videos from YouTube, crime videos work well as do Walt Disney cartoons – even with adult learners for some reason!
You might also be interested in reading my helpful article on how to get your students speaking fluently, here.
Mind Mapping
Vocabulary relationships. Engage students in a subject which contains lots of relationships of cause and effect. Basically, you need to pick a topic and analyse what the different factors were that affected the main decision or characters involved.
In the centre of your mind map place the decision or a character that was made and then arrange influencing factors around this.
The larger the circle each factor is in and the closer it is to the centre of the paper the stronger the influence is. Students then need to explain their mind map and the relationships to the group. Others can question and agree/ disagree with them.
Topics can range from serious issues from history through to celebrity scandals, or even plots in a movie, such as, why did celebrity couple X and Y get divorced, or why did actor x decide to y in the movie xyz. Obviously, you can let the students self select these issues for greater interest.
Backs To The Board
A timeless classic not so much a speaking project but this can be developed into a full lesson’s worth of speaking and it works for groups of all sizes. It is excellent for reviewing vocabulary at the end of a project or to see what students know at the beginning of a topic.
Simply split the group into teams of no more than five and have one member of the group come to the front and sit with their back to the board.
The other members of the group form a ‘u’ shape around the person, or, rather than being sat literally against the board groups can be sat at tables with just one student having their back to the board.
All you then need to do is to write a word on the board and the students facing the board have to get the person not facing the board to say the word without literally telling them the word. They should be encouraged to use definitions, synonyms and examples of the word where possible.
Depending on numbers, students can just shout out when they think they have the answer, or with large groups I make the students raise their hand if they think they have the answer.
Debates
The danger with debates is that to the teacher they may seem boring, or at least they do to me but have to remind myself that just because I have done the debates dozens of times, they haven’t and even the most overdone/boring sounding debates may go down like fireworks with some groups.
With that in mind here are a few of the more traditional/boring debates for your students to get their teeth into:
Which is better, country life or city life?
Should animal testing be allowed?
Should school uniforms be gotten rid of
Are cats better than dogs?
Should women be paid as much as men?
Online learning is better than classroom learning
Does money equal success in life?
I also like to see if there is something going on in the students view of the world that is worth debating. For example, in Thailand the debate over whether Korean pop music is better than Thai pop music is a popular one.
I have had colleagues dive into debates about serious political topics with higher level students which have worked really well.
However, some topics are just too hot to handle and you don’t know who you are upsetting so be careful what topics you do debate, you never know who is listening, or who is going to offense at any of your personal views that you may let slip!
Here is a good resource for more ESL debate ideas.
Book And Movie Reviews
This is pretty much as it sounds. I like to set a reading task for students over a holiday break and when they return they have to submit a video review of the book or movie they watched/read.
I usually show them a good movie review for ideas and ask them to follow the same format. Something like this review of Kung Fu Panda. This goes along the lines of: background information, main characters, plot explanation, favorite moments, final recommendation.
I’ve also done this with higher level groups for documentaries but with enough support and speaking frames pre intermediate students can engage well with this activity.
Conversation Questions
Don’t underestimate the value of pure lists of conversation questions. Students are often happy to just ‘have a chat’ and use the English that they do know.
It is great for their confidence and fluency, as well as requiring zero lesson prep, which is always a nice thing. Just be sure to rotate speaking partners to avoid students getting bored with the same partners and used to different accents.
Sometimes, depending on ability and interest levels I will teach three or four idioms at the beginning of the lesson and set the task of trying to naturally drop them into conversation later on.
There are lot of good sources of conversation questions, here are a couple: eslconversationquestions.com and esldiscussions.com.
ESL Exam Preparation Material
Some students are hugely motivated by doing well in exams such as the IELTS test, and IGCSE ESL speaking tests. Exam boards for tests such as these produce a plethora of practise material that is often available for free online and ready to be use.
My students particularly enjoy the IELTS speaking part 2 task where they are required to speak about a given topic and are given three bullet points to talk about. They are given one minute to prepare their ideas before they have to speak on their own for two minutes.
If you think your students might enjoy this then here are some good sources of free IELTS style questions: IELTS IDP and ielts-exam.net, and for IGCSE ESL speaking questions check out the role play paper here.
The added bonus of these activities is that there is always a grading criteria ready to be used so you can grade students and give them real reasons why they scored a certain level and what they need to do to score higher in the future.
Here are the IELTS speaking criteria for example which clearly spells out what is expected of students at different levels.
Finger Puppet Shows
One really good way to get shy students speaking I have found to introduce sock puppets. As silly as it sounds, there is something about using a puppet that takes away the pressure on the speaker and frees them up to speak.
Whether it is the element of hilarity of speaking sock or the fact that people are generally looking at the sock rather than the person it seems to work well.
Depending on the ability level I will either give pairs of students scripts to act out with puppets. They can introduce their own props as well to make it even more funny. Alternatively, I will do this as an improv.
I will read out a situation, for example, one of you has lost their passport at the airport. Then the students have to act out this scenes as best as they can.
Switch partners and introduce more situations and watch the energy level of the room pick up!
By the end of the lesson you may well notice previously shy students speaking confidently with other students having been drawn into the magic of sock puppets! A great little speaking project.
Role Plays With Idioms
I use this lesson pattern quite regularly and it works well. I start off with student matching idioms to meanings and then to example sentences with the idioms missing.
After going through these answers and doing any teaching necessary to aid understanding I will then hand out a dialogue but with all the sentences jumbled up.
Students then have to unjumble the conversation which contains one or more of the idioms being used in a natural way. Next, they read the dialogue through taking different roles each and then doing the dialogue again without looking at the words.
Next, students are given the task of creating their own dialogues using at least one of the idioms in an appropriate way. Students write out the dialogues, rehearse them and then act them out for the group.
You can also do this with phrasal verbs but either way it works out well and the routine can be used again when you are a bit short of material or are having a hangover day!
Barrier Activities
One favourite of mine that never fails to stimulate plenty of language use is to simply create your own barrier exercise. I like to get a nice chunky newspaper article related to what we are learning and then go through each paragraph and remove key details, such as: names, dates, place names, times, location etcetera…
I create two versions of this, the first one will have words missing from odd number paragraphs and the second copy will have words missing from even number paragraphs.
This prevents it from becoming confusing and make sure to keep one master version with no details missing and if you have time highlight the missing words in red so it is easy for students to check later.
Once the missing word copies are ready you can divide the class into two halves distributing sheet A to one half and sheet B to the other half. Allow them to work in groups at this point to work out what questions they need to ask the other half of the group in order to get the missing details filled in.
If you think this will be too difficult for them you can provide the questions in a jumbled up format so they have to rearrange them to make the questions,, or even give them the questions but they have to work out the order in which to ask them to correspond to the paragraph order.
After this preparation period students can then pair up with someone from the opposite half of the group to take turns asking and answering each other’s questions.
Make sure that students do not show each other their articles and simply just sit and copy the answers, clearly this simply defeats the whale point of the exercise.
Before starting this I also pre teach any tricky vocabulary that I know is going to come up in the article just to make sure the final questions and answer session goes without too much stopping and starting to ask about vocabulary.
After students have got the answers then you can either display the answers on an overhead projector, or send students back to their original half of the group to see if they have all gotten the same answers.
Jigsaw Reading
This is another easy way to get students involved in the language and speaking. Select a relevant article related to the topic you are studying and chop it up into paragraphs. Hand out A4 paper with a simple one column table with as many boxes as there are paragraphs.
Hand out the paragraphs to the students considering which paragraphs are more difficult and should go to the higher level learners and which are slightly easier and can go to the lower ability students.
Individually, students now summarise in their own words as far as possible their paragraphs and write the summary in a box in the table. Following this students pair up with students who had a different paragraph and they then read out their summaries whilst the other students make notes of it.
Rotate partners so that everyone can get every paragraph and after the first couple of times students have read their summaries, force students to turn over their paper and explain their paragraph from memory.
After the first couple of goes they should be able to do this and by the time they have explained to everyone in the group they should be reeling off their summary very comfortably.
A Word On Differentiation…
There is a lot of fun to be had for the students in the above activities but it is important to not forget that some students will require more support than others. Just asking students to do a role play with no support may be too much for some.
Always consider using speaking frames, having sentence starters placed around the room, ‘useful language’ handouts, and always show a clear model of what it is you are expecting the students to produce.
If you can tick those boxes then your speaking lesson will go that bit more smoothly.
All the best with your ESL speaking projects!