10 Best Speaking Activities for ESL Students | For all ages and levels

Summary

In this video, Charlie from 'Charlie's Lessons' shares his top 10 favorite speaking activities for students. He emphasizes that speaking is the most challenging skill to improve, compared to reading or writing. The activities include classic games like 'Truth or Lie,' 'Taboo,' and creative tasks like 'Rank Everything' and 'There's a Monkey in My Bag.' These exercises aim to enhance students' language skills through interactive and fun methods, encouraging reasoning, teamwork, and communication. Charlie also provides tips for incorporating these activities into everyday classroom settings to boost speaking practice.

Takeaways

• 😀 Students most commonly want to improve their speaking skills, as it’s harder to practice alone compared to reading, listening, or writing.
• 🗣️ The ‘Truth or Lie’ activity involves students guessing which of five statements is false, encouraging reasoning and discussion.
• 🤝 The ‘Three Things About a Partner’ activity is useful for substitute teachers, helping students learn more about each other while promoting interaction.
• 🚫 The ‘Taboo’ game helps students describe words without using the actual word, enhancing their vocabulary and communication skills.
• 📺 A variation of Taboo uses videos or pictures instead of words, where students describe what they see to another student with their back to the board.
• ❓ The ‘Riddles’ activity engages students by having them guess answers to riddles, promoting critical thinking and reasoning in English.
• 👥 The ‘Corners’ activity involves students physically moving to either the agree or disagree side of the room based on a controversial statement, encouraging discussion.
• 📝 In the ‘Surveys’ activity, students create questionnaires using target language, gather responses, and analyze findings, using tools like Google Forms for efficiency.
• 🐒 The ‘Excuses’ and ‘There's a Monkey in My Bag’ activities help students practice reasoning by coming up with creative explanations for imaginary situations.
• 🏆 The ‘Rank Everything’ activity asks students to create top 10 lists and compare them with official lists, fostering competition and discussion about their choices.

Q & A

What is the most common skill students want to improve according to the speaker?

The most common skill students want to improve is speaking.

Why is speaking considered more difficult to practice on your own compared to other skills?

Speaking is considered more difficult to practice alone because it requires interaction with another person to get feedback and correction, unlike reading, listening, or writing, which can be done individually.

What is the ‘Truth or Lie’ activity mentioned in the video?

In the 'Truth or Lie' activity, the teacher writes five sentences about themselves on the board, one of which is false. Students discuss in pairs which sentence they think is false and provide reasoning.

How is the ‘Three Facts About a Partner’ activity beneficial in a classroom?

The ‘Three Facts About a Partner’ activity is beneficial because it encourages students to get to know each other better and provides the teacher with insight into the students' relationships within the class.

How is the ‘Taboo’ activity structured in this video?

In the ‘Taboo’ activity, one student sits with their back to the board while the rest of the class describes a word written on the board without saying it directly. The seated student must guess the word based on the descriptions.

What variation of the ‘Taboo’ activity does the speaker describe using a video?

The variation involves playing a video instead of writing a word on the board. The students describe the video’s content to a student who cannot see it, helping them guess what is being shown.

What is the purpose of the ‘Riddles’ activity?

The ‘Riddles’ activity engages students by challenging them to solve riddles written on the board, promoting discussion in English and encouraging reasoning and problem-solving.

How does the ‘Corners’ activity work?

In the ‘Corners’ activity, students physically move to a corner of the room labeled 'Agree' or 'Disagree' based on their opinion about a controversial statement written on the board. This encourages both movement and discussion.

What modern tool does the speaker recommend for conducting surveys, and why?

The speaker recommends using Google Forms for conducting surveys because it allows students to answer questions in various formats and provides a summary of the responses, which can be analyzed in class.

What is the goal of the ‘Rank Everything’ activity?

The goal of the ‘Rank Everything’ activity is to have students create a top 10 list on a specific topic and compare it with an official top 10 list. This promotes discussion about similarities and differences between the lists.

Outlines

00:00

🎤 Introduction to 10 Speaking Activities

In this video, Charlie introduces his favorite 10 speaking activities for students, based on 12 years of teaching experience. He discusses the importance of speaking practice, highlighting that while reading, listening, and writing can often be practiced alone, speaking usually requires interaction. Charlie humorously notes how odd it is to practice speaking alone and quickly transitions into the first activity: 'Truth or Lie.' He explains how this game engages students by encouraging them to identify false statements, fostering reasoning and debate.

05:04

📝 Truth or Lie: Engaging Students with Statements

Charlie introduces the 'Truth or Lie' activity, a game where students must identify the false statement among five sentences written by the teacher. This activity is designed to promote critical thinking and interaction among students, especially during the first meeting. Charlie explains how students discuss and debate which statement is false, and how he monitors their progress, noting errors to address later. This dynamic game works well in many settings, making it a versatile tool for improving communication skills.

10:04

👥 Partner Facts: Learning About Each Other

The second activity is designed for situations where the teacher is substituting for another and the students already know each other. Each student shares three facts about a partner, earning points for correct statements and losing points for incorrect ones. This activity helps the teacher gauge how well the students know each other while promoting friendly competition and interaction.

❌ Taboo: Describing Vocabulary Without Saying It

The third activity, 'Taboo,' focuses on vocabulary recall and description. A student sits with their back to the board while classmates describe a word written on the board without saying it directly. This activity is helpful in teaching students how to describe objects using alternative vocabulary, and Charlie emphasizes the importance of providing useful descriptive language before starting the game.

🎥 Video Descriptions: Guessing Through Visual Clues

This fourth activity builds on the 'Taboo' game but uses videos or images instead of words. Students describe a video or image shown on the board to a student facing away, encouraging detailed descriptions. Recently, Charlie used Olympic sports clips as an example, where students had to describe the sport being shown. This dynamic encourages active listening and vivid descriptions.

🧩 Riddles: Critical Thinking in the Classroom

The fifth activity involves presenting riddles to students as they enter the classroom, sparking curiosity and discussion. Students collaborate in English to solve the riddles, write their answers on the board, and provide reasons for their guesses. Charlie finds this activity fun and engaging as students work on their reasoning skills in a playful manner.

↔️ Corners: Agree or Disagree with Controversial Statements

In the 'Corners' activity, Charlie writes a controversial statement on the board, and students must physically move to either the 'Agree' or 'Disagree' corner of the room. This activity combines physical movement with language skills, as students must articulate their reasons for agreeing or disagreeing. Charlie advises teaching language for opinions, agreement, and disagreement before starting to ensure productive discussions.

📊 Surveys: Gathering Data and Sharing Insights

Charlie introduces the 'Surveys' activity, where students create questions based on target language and conduct surveys among their classmates. Using tools like Google Forms, students can collect and analyze data, leading to class-wide discussions. Charlie highlights how this activity can be used to make generalizations about the class and encourages students to engage in real-world data collection and reporting.

🗣️ Excuses: Practicing Reasoning on the Spot

In this activity, 'Excuses,' students must come up with a reason for leaving the classroom early. Charlie explains how this exercise helps students improve their ability to quickly form sentences and justify their actions. Over time, students become better at producing logical and creative reasons, enhancing their fluency in expressing cause and effect.

🐵 There's a Monkey in My Bag: Developing Creativity

This creative activity asks students to imagine they have an unusual object, such as a monkey, in their bag. They must then explain why they have the object. Charlie uses this as a fun way to stimulate imaginative thinking and reasoning, and notes that the stranger the object, the more entertaining the exercise becomes. It encourages students to think quickly and develop more complex language structures.

🏆 Rank Everything: Top 10 Lists for Fun Competition

Charlie wraps up with 'Rank Everything,' where students create a top 10 list on a specific topic and compare it with an official list from the internet. Students earn points based on how well their list matches the official one, sparking discussion and debate. This activity promotes critical thinking, research skills, and friendly competition as students justify their choices and learn about different perspectives.

Keywords

💡Speaking activities

Speaking activities are exercises designed to improve students' spoken language skills. In the video, the teacher introduces 10 speaking activities that he uses in his classes to help students practice and improve their communication. Examples include 'Truth or Lie' and 'Corners,' which encourage student interaction and speaking practice.

💡Truth or Lie

'Truth or Lie' is an activity where the teacher presents several statements about themselves, and students must guess which one is false. This activity is used as an icebreaker and encourages students to engage in discussion, practice reasoning, and communicate with one another in English.

💡Taboo

Taboo is a classic speaking activity where a student tries to guess a word based on descriptions from their classmates without hearing the actual word. It helps students develop descriptive language skills and fosters teamwork. In the video, this activity encourages the use of vocabulary and synonyms.

💡Video description

This activity involves students describing a video that others cannot see. In the video, the teacher used this to enhance vocabulary and speaking skills by having students describe Olympic sports. This task encourages students to use descriptive language and develop their ability to convey complex ideas verbally.

💡Riddles

Riddles are puzzles or problems that students solve using critical thinking and language skills. The teacher in the video uses riddles to challenge students and provoke English-language discussion, such as the example riddle 'I have hands and a face but can’t hold anything,' referring to a clock.

💡Corners

'Corners' is a speaking activity where students physically move to different corners of the room based on whether they agree or disagree with a controversial statement. This activity promotes debate and discussion, allowing students to practice expressing opinions and reasoning in English.

💡Surveys

Surveys involve students asking their classmates questions to gather information on a particular topic. The video suggests using tools like Google Forms to collect data. This activity allows students to practice target language forms, then analyze and discuss the results as a class.

💡Excuses

In the 'Excuses' activity, students are asked to come up with a reason for why they need to leave class early. This task develops their reasoning and language skills, especially their ability to construct logical sentences on the spot. Over time, it enhances students' fluency in giving reasons.

💡Rank everything

In 'Rank Everything,' students create a top 10 list on a given topic and compare their lists with an official version. This activity not only promotes discussion but also fosters comparison and debate as students analyze why certain items made the list and others did not.

💡Language of reasoning

The language of reasoning refers to expressions and phrases used to explain reasons and make logical arguments, such as 'because,' 'so,' and 'therefore.' In the video, this concept is reinforced in activities like 'Excuses' and 'There's a Monkey in My Bag,' where students must justify their responses.

Highlights

The speaker shares 10 favorite speaking activities that can be used to enhance students' speaking skills.

Students most commonly want to improve their speaking skills, as it’s difficult to practice speaking by themselves compared to reading, listening, or writing.

Activity 1: 'Truth or Lie' - The teacher writes five sentences about themselves (one false) for students to guess, encouraging reasoning and discussion.

Activity 2: 'Get to Know Your Partner' - Students describe their partner with correct and incorrect sentences, offering insights into how well they know each other.

Activity 3: 'Taboo' - One student guesses a word based on clues from classmates without hearing the actual word, encouraging description skills.

Activity 4: Video or Picture Description - Students describe what they see to a peer who can’t view the content, enhancing their descriptive language.

Activity 5: 'Riddles' - The teacher writes riddles on the board, prompting students to discuss and guess the answers in English, fostering critical thinking.

Activity 6: 'Corners' - Students physically move to a side of the room that represents their opinion (Agree/Disagree) on a controversial topic, stimulating debates.

Activity 7: 'Surveys' - Students create and conduct surveys, then analyze the data using tools like Google Forms, supporting target language practice.

Activity 8: 'Excuses' - Students line up and give excuses for leaving class early, helping them practice spontaneous language reasoning.

Activity 9: 'There's a Monkey in My Bag' - Students invent reasons for having unusual objects in their bags, encouraging creativity and reasoning.

Activity 10: 'Rank Everything' - Students rank items related to a topic (e.g., top 10 things their city is known for), then compare their lists to official rankings.

The 'Truth or Lie' game promotes speaking, reasoning, and interaction as students justify their guesses.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of preparing useful language structures before activities like 'Taboo' to ensure students can participate effectively.

In the 'Rank Everything' activity, students not only compare their lists but also engage in discussions about why certain items made the official top 10 list.

Transcripts

In this video we're looking at speaking activities and I'm going to share with

you 10 of my favorites that I use with my students every year.

My name is Charlie this is Charlie's lessons and thank you for coming back to watch another video.

Now one of the most common questions we ask our students before we go into class with them

is, what is the area you'd like to improve on the most? And from experience over the last 12 years

there is one winner. The skill that students like to improve the most is not reading, it’s not

listening, it’s not writing, it's speaking. Now this probably doesn't come much of a surprise to you

as for example reading and listening can be practiced by yourself, writing is a skill that you

can practice by yourself but you guess you do need a teacher or someone with a higher level than you

to give you some advice and corrections, whereas speaking, well speaking is kind of difficult to do

by yourself. Some people advise practicing speaking when you are on your own but I always found that a

bit strange. ‘Hi there nice to meet you!’ ‘Nice to meet you too!’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I'm from Bath in the

UK’ ‘oh I'm from Bath too!’ ‘What do you do for a living?’ ‘oh I'm a Director of Studies at a language

school in Spain’ ‘Wait I'm a Director of Studies at a language school too’ ‘Are you making a video

for your YouTube channel?’ ‘Yes I'm making a video for my YouTube channel too!’ ‘Wait what's going on?!’

So let's get started with the first activity which is an activity that I call ‘Truth or Lie’. Now you're

probably familiar with this one and you've played it with your students once or twice I'm sure.

This dynamic though can be incorporated into almost any activity you do with your students

it doesn't have to be speaking. The way I use this is if I'm meeting my students for the first time

I'll write on the board five sentences about myself and one of them is false. So let's do a

little practice together, here are five sentences and one of them is false. In my next video I will

reveal to you which one is the false sentence but meanwhile write a comment below and tell me which

one you think is false. When I do this in class I'll have the five sentences on the board and I'll

put the students into pairs. They will then discuss which one they think is false and give their

reasoning as to why. I will then monitor each pair making notes of any errors or mistakes they make

and then when we finish the discussion time, I'll then get the students to stand up and give their

reasoning as to why they think which sentence is the false sentence. Once the students have chosen

their sentence and given their reasoning I will allow a little bit of time for students to reason

against each other if they've chosen a different sentence. Activity number two is an activity

that is especially useful for teachers who have to substitute or cover other teachers or colleagues

that are off sick or are not coming to school that day. So, on these occasions you're walking into a

classroom with a group of students that you've never met before but they all know each other. So,

what I do is I get students individually to say three things about a partner and what I do is that

I will give them a point for every sentence that is correct about their partner but if they give a

sentence that is incorrect about their partner I take a point away. I love doing this activity

because it gives me an insight as to whether the students are actually trying to get to know each

other or not. If I have a student that gives a lot of incorrect information about a classmate then I

might ask them to sit together during that class. Activity number three is an absolute classic. In

my classroom we know it as taboo. All we do is have one student sit at the front of the

class with their back to the board and we write one piece of vocabulary on the board. The rest of the

students have to describe this word to the student sitting down with their back to the board without

saying the word. I find it really important that before you do this activity is that you give some

students useful language they can use to describe words without saying it. For example like this;

This language will go on the board before you start the task. Activity number four is very

similar to the taboo activity we saw earlier this is because we use the same dynamic. We

have one student with their back to the board and the other students looking at what's on

the board. In this case instead of a word on the board I'm going to play a video and this

video can be of anything that allows the students watching to describe to the student not watching.

Recently I linked this to a topic we were doing in class which was sports and I found a video

of a series of olympic sports in action and the students had to describe every movement and every

moment to the student so that they could guess what olympic sport was being shown. Another twist

on this is instead of a word or a video is to have a picture behind the student. Now you could either

freeze a video or take another picture and have the students that can see the picture

describe everything they can in two minutes. The student that's listening has to then at

the end of the two minutes tell the teacher what information was missing from the original group

of students that were looking at the photo. Activity number five is one called riddles.

What I do is I get inside the classroom before the students arrive and I write one or two or

three riddles on the board. Once the students are arriving one by one and I'm setting up the class

the students look at the board and they start wondering what the answers for each

riddle is. I love this moment and I ask them to do it in English and I listen to them

and at the end of the discussion I get them to write their answers on the board. I then take a

look at all their answers that are on the board and get them to come up with reasons why they think

the answer is correct. For example I have hands and a face but I can't hold anything or smile.

That's right, it's a clock, it has hands a face can't hold anything or smile.

A clock can't smile, think about that, it's really sad.

The sixth activity that I want to explain to you is one I call corners. What you do is you tell

the students that on this corner of the room is Agree and on this corner of the room is Disagree.

Then you write a controversial statement on the board and you ask the students to stand up

and move to either agree or disagree. I like this activity because it has the physical aspect to it,

so the students have to get up out of their seats and move to where they agree or disagree with

the statement so for example you could start off with a statement that's very, you know, non-offensive

like, you know, should we bring back the death penalty? And then move on to something maybe, more

controversial, maybe more risque, you know, like should you put pineapple on a pizza? Before you

start this activity I'd say it's very important you go through language of opinion, agreement and

disagreement, so that students are clear on how the interactions are going to play out.

The seventh activity that I want to share with you is one called surveys.

Now other teachers might know it as ‘find someone who’ or just simple questionnaires.

The way this works is that you have the target language and you ask the students to write

five questions. For example using the target language, they then have to ask each student

in the classroom those questions and feedback to the class and to the teacher their findings.

Now in today's world we can create surveys really quickly using an app like google forms

and the thing I love about google forms is that it gives each student the ability to answer questions

in lots of different ways . Also when the student has finished asking all their questions to the

other students the information they get from all the answers is collated in the response section of

the google forms. This is perfect for the next stage of the survey activities that I like to do

which is once the surveys are over, not just to put them to one side, but to look

at what each student said and come up with some kind of statements that are true for the class as

a whole. So for example, if a student is asking what do you do in your free time then you might ask the

students what did the majority of the students say in this class, so for example nine percent of the

students would probably say playing video games, and that would be shown in the response section

of the google form. Activity number eight is an activity that I call excuses but it's an activity

that I stole from Harry Waters. in this activity I asked the students to line up at the door

and ask each one to come up with an excuse on why they should leave earlier than their classmates.

Before you do this activity get them to come up with language of reason, so simple things like

because, and so, and try and do this after every single class and you'll find by the end of the

year their ability to come up with excuses on the spot improves a lot. Activity number nine is an

activity that is similar to the previous activity and that we are continuing to develop students

language of reasoning and this activity is called there's a monkey in my bag. What we do is we

imagine that each student has a monkey in their bag and has to give a reason why they're carrying

a monkey in their bag. Now in this activity I use monkey because it’s something quite ridiculous but

the students can choose any other animal or object that might be in their bag and explain why. Usually

the more abstract and stranger the object is the more fun the students have with this task.

Here I actually have an example of one of my students doing an activity earlier. ‘Yes Charlie?’

‘What's in my bag?’ ‘I've got an inhaler because I have asthma I have got a… what's this called

Charlie?’ ‘A bike pump Pedro!’ ‘A bike pump because I have a bike and a clock because I'm always on time!’

‘Oh for god's sake Pedro. The final activity in this video is one called rank everything. Now if you go

on the internet nowadays there is a top 10 for literally anything so what I like to do with my

students is, we pick a topic or a subject and the students make a top 10 list of their own. What

I do to make a competition is I give the students one point every time an item on their list appears

on the official top 10 list I've taken from the internet. I also give them two points if the

item that they write on their list appears in the same position as it does on the top 10 official

list from the internet. So recently we did ones where we had students from different nationalities

in the class and we had top 10 things that Germany is famous for or top 10 things that

France is famous for or another time we did one with our local students we did top 10 things to do

in the city where they're from. In this case Cadiz, so for example on tripadvisor they

have a list of top 10 things to do, top 10 restaurants, top 10 bars, loads of things.

So once the students have made their list I then get them to compare with another partner

and talk about why they have the same or why there are some missing from one student's list

that are present on another student's list then we compare all the lists against

the official top 10. We then talk about what's present in the list from the top 10 online

and what's missing from the students lists. I remember one particular class where students

came up with a list of top 10 things to do in their city and there were some big things missing

from the official top 10 list which sparked a lot of debate in the class about why it was missing

and so on. So there you have it, 10 activities that can help improve your student’s speaking

skills in no time. Try to incorporate a lot of these activities into your routine in class, that

way the students are getting the most practice possible. So I'll see you in the next video and

goodbye!