Activity type: several short speaking activities

Level: A2+
Age: Teenage/Adult
Planning time has been shown to increase production in speaking tasks. Lower level learners
often find it especially difficult to speak spontaneously, so these activities incorporate thinking
time during which learners can prepare for speaking by planning what they are going to say, and
asking the teacher or using a dictionary to look up missing vocabulary. The following activities
are relatively short, with minimal materials preparation time for the teacher. They are designed
for use as a warmer or a filler in the middle or at the end of a class.
1. Definitions lists
This activity is good for activating existing vocabulary or revising vocabulary studied in
previous lessons.
Procedure:
Choose a vocabulary topic (this can be vocabulary you have recently studied or a topic
you want to introduce). Tell students to write a list of 10 words they associate with this
topic. To make the activity shorter, reduce the number of words.
Pre-teach / revise structures for definitions e.g. Its a thing which / that.... You use it for...
You find this in.... Its an animal / object / place... Its the opposite of... etc.
Tell students to look at their lists and give them time to think of how they can define
these words (3 -5 mins).
Now students work in pairs (or groups of 3) to define their words. Their partner must
guess the word they are defining.
A faster moving, fun alternative to this activity is a team game.
Change the vocabulary to lists of famous people / books / films / objects.
Each team writes a list for another team (students can also 3 or 4 words each on strips of
paper to draw out of a hat)
Pre-teach / revise structures for definitions e.g. Its a thing which / that.... You use it for...
Its a film / book / object.... He/ Shes an actor / a politician.... Hes British / American /
Spanish...
Each team nominates one person to define the words to their team.
Each team has 1 minute to define as many words as possible.
2. What were you doing...? (What are you going to do....?)
This activity can be adapted to revise a range of tenses (present simple, past simple, continuous,
future tenses) by changing the time prompts.
Procedure:

Write a selection of time prompts on the board e.g. yesterday at 6 oclock, this time last
year, on September 11th 2001 etc

Tell students to choose some of the prompts and think of what they were doing at these
times. Tell students that they are going to tell a partner / small group.

Give students time 5 minutes to plan what they are going to say and ask for any
vocabulary they need.

Students tell their partner / small group. Encourage students to ask for more information.
E.g. I was watching TV yesterday at 6. -What were you watching?

After speaking, students feedback and tell the class what they learnt. E.g. Marie was
watching TV at 6 oclock yesterday. She loves chat shows!

3. Adjectives
This is a variation on the above activity and is great for practising adjectives. Students
personalise the discussion by talking about experiences and feelings.
Procedure:

Write a selection of adjectives relating to feelings on the board.

Tell students to choose several adjectives (increase or decrease the number depending on
how long you want the activity to take). Tell them to think of a time when they felt this
way, and that they are going to tell their partner / small group about their experience.

Give students time to plan what they are going to say. They can make notes and ask for
vocabulary if they want to.

Students tell their stories.

Feedback to the class.

Cartoons, cartoon stories and unusual pictures

There are many copyright-free comic strips, cartoons and unusual images available online; you
can also find cartoon stories in many EFL resource books. These can be used in class in a
number of ways.
4. Information gap activity: Order the story
Information gap and jigsaw tasks have been shown to be beneficial task types in terms of
promoting obligatory, as opposed to optional information exchange and as a way of promoting

collaborative dialogue in the classroom. In this activity, students work in pairs and the
information, i.e. the pictures are divided equally between them. Students must work
collaboratively to put the story together in the right order. Suitable for strong Pre-intermediate
students and above.
Procedure:

Before the class, find a cartoon with at least 4 vignettes. The cartoon can be with or
without dialogue. The more vignettes and more elements in the story, the more difficult
the task.

Print the cartoon and cut up the vignettes. Divide the vignettes equally between student A
and student B.

Give students time to think about how to describe their pictures and ask for any
vocabulary they need.

Pre-teach any difficult vocabulary that has not come up as well as phrases for talking
about pictures and sequencing: e.g. In my picture there is... I can see... I think this is the
first / second / last picture... Then.... After that....

Tell students to work together to put the story in the correct order.

Optional extension: Tell students to write the story.

5. Write the dialogue

Procedure:

Take a comic strip, a cartoon, or unusual image in which there are several people or
characters. If there is dialogue or captions, blank it out.

Display the comic / cartoon / image and elicit ideas from students about what is
happening in it. Who are the people / characters? What are they doing? What happens
next? What are they saying to each other?

Put students in pair or small groups. Tell them to work together and write the dialogue
and /or captions for the comic, cartoon or image.

Students practice their dialogues and read their version out to the class.

Whats the question?

This activity is good for practising questions and for fluency practice on a range of topics.
Procedure:

Write a list of questions (one per student in your class) relating to your chosen topic. For
example, if your topic is music, you could think of questions like: Who is your favourite
singer? What is your favourite music to dance to? Whats the best concert you have ever
been to? Who is a singer / group you hate? etc. Adapt the questions to the level of your
class.

Give each student a question. Tell students to write the answer to their question (not the
question itself) on a piece of paper or a sticky label. Tell them not to show anyone their
answer yet.

Tell the class the topic (e.g. music). Give students 5 minutes with a partner to brainstorm
possible questions related to this topic.

Now tell students to stand up and stick their label on their chest or hold their paper with
their answer in front of them. Students move around the room and ask each other
questions to try to discover the questions that the other students were originally asked.

Encourage students to ask follow up questions and try to have a conversation. -Whats the
best concert youve ever been to? -Michael Jackson -When was the concert? -Why was it
good?

Feedback and ask students what they found out.

Teaching Teens #1: Speaking activities

Teaching teenagers can be challenging. In a new series of posts, the authors of Interactive Jo
Budden, Helen Hadkins, and Samantha Lewis will be offering advice. In todays post, Helen
suggests some tips to get your teenagers speaking.
Some teenagers are too shy to speak much in class; others never shut up! Getting students
speaking in English and keeping them on-task isnt always easy, but you can nearly always find a
way by experimenting with different techniques and activities. Here are some tried and tested
ideas for starting teenagers off, and then keeping them speaking in English.
Preparation helps make perfect.
Before a speaking activity, have students plan what they are going to say in pairs. That will give
them time to ask about useful vocabulary or look up words, and even rehearse and practise
pronunciation. Then change the pairs for the main speaking activity. If you have students
arranged in pairs, half the class can just turn round and speak to the person behind them (the
other half speaks to the person in front).
Fun drills.
Do you want students to use recently-taught functional language in a speaking activity? Try
different kinds of fun drills of the language first: very slowly and sleepily, very loudly and
angrily, frightened and whispering etc, and finally using natural intonation. When the students do
the speaking activity they are more likely to remember the phrases, and more likely to use
intelligible pronunciation.
Keep it in English!
Problems with keeping your students speaking in English? Make sure you have examples of the
language they need at hand, on some kind of a handout, on the board or on the wall. For
example, phrases for agreeing and disagreeing which are useful in many situations: Actually, I
think / Yes, youre right.
Carrots or sticks?
The use of rewards systems can increase the use of English. For example: the best Englishspeaker of the week gets to choose next weeks song. Groups who do best get to choose a fun
activity (from a choice that you give). For younger teens, try team points or stickers. ClassDojo
is an app for online classroom management which you could also use for praising speaking
achievement, effort, etc. Again, for younger teens.

 Reflect and repeat.

This technique usually boosts performance. After a speaking activity in pairs, e.g. telling a short
anecdote, get the students to reflect on how they did. Ask them to think about the structure of
their story, the tenses they used, the vocabulary they used, their fluency, pronunciation, etc. Next,
get them to change partner and repeat the activity; then get them to reflect again. Students will
almost always think they have done better the second time. (Make sure you monitor carefully, so
you can tell them that they are right!)
Variety is the spice of life.
Introduce variety into your speaking lesson by partner-swapping. If the classroom allows,
arrange the chairs in two circles (an inner and an outer circle / horseshoe) with the students
sitting in pairs facing each other, one in each circle. Give the students a question to discuss and a
time limit. When the times up, get the students on the inner circle to move round a chair and
discuss a new question with a new partner. The questions can be dictated or on the board. Repeat
indefinitely!
Fun intonation practice.
Liven up a role-play by getting students to act it out first using mime and just one word, e.g.
raspberry. You can demonstrate with an extrovert student first. Explain that the idea is to get
feelings across, not to try and mimic actual sentences. Get the students really thinking about the
intonation of the dialogue by exaggerating their one word. Finally, they repeat as a normal
roleplay.
Spanner in the works.
Before a speaking activity, give one student in each pair a secret characteristic, e.g. youre in a
rush, you cant hear very well or you like interrupting. This will make the exchange more
unpredictable and more like authentic communication.