When asked why they study English, most students will say it’s because they want to communicate. They might also want to find a better job, pass an exam or simply be better at English, but oral communication is what students usually put very high on their priority list. What is more, many foreign language students admit that the fact that they can speak a language they couldn’t speak, say, a year earlier, makes them feel extremely satisfied and keeps them motivated. Whether you teach low-level or advanced learners, use these five speaking fluency activities for ESL students to help them communicate better in English. You can use the activities as warm-ups, fillers, and whenever you feel that your students (and you!) need them.

1. Small talk

Used every day by people all over the world, small talk or a quick chat is a great way to practise fluency, revise and make students feel more confident about speaking English. It can be used with students on all levels and repeated regularly in different forms. You can simply ask your students how their weekend was, or how they’ve been, but you could also choose a couple of questions from the list below to make the classroom small talk more varied. Ask follow-up questions and encourage other students to do so, too.

• Do you like the weather today? / Is it too cold or too hot for you? / Do you think it’ll rain?
• What were three things you did before the lesson? / Did you have to rush to get here on time?
• What time did you get up this morning? / What time do you think you’ll go to bed tonight?
• What have you eaten today? / Who have you talked to today?
• What’s the most exciting thing you have done today? / How has your day been so far?
• What’s the most boring thing you need to do this week? / What are you looking forward to this week?
• What have you heard on the news lately?
• Have you seen any good films recently? / Have you seen any funny videos on YouTube?
• Have you spoken, watched or read anything in English since our last lesson?
• What five words or phrases can you remember from our last lesson? What do they mean or when do we use them?

If you want your students to practise small talk more, check out our lesson plan on small talk.

2. Photos

Visual aids are not only a great prompt for speaking, but they also make the lesson more interactive and engaging. Regardless of the students’ level, they are a valuable tool for practising speaking. There are numerous websites where you can generate random pictures (like here or here) and use them to make your students talk. Apart from the obvious ‘describe the picture’ part, use the set of questions below to make the task more interesting or more appropriate for high-level students. The questions work with any picture, and develop not only speaking fluency, but also the ability to think critically in English.

• Why was the photo taken/the picture made?
• Where would you expect to see it?
• Would you set it as the wallpaper on your computer?
• What feelings does it evoke in you?
• Would you change anything in it to make it more interesting?
• Have you ever taken a similar photo/made a similar picture?

Do you think your students could benefit from such speaking fluency activities? In this lesson for lower-level students you will find tasks to help with picture description, and at the end of this lesson for advanced students you will find sets of photos with extra questions.

3. Would you rather…?

An oldie but a goodie. Everybody likes talking about their preferences, and as teachers we can use this fact to get our students talking. The rule here is that students must explain why they prefer something over something else, because that is when production happens. Use the examples below, and once your students get the gist of the activity, ask them to prepare more of the ‘Would you rather’ questions in pairs. Give them a theme: holidays, work, lifestyle, possessions, extremes, etc. They can then answer other students’ questions.

Would you rather…?

• visit the Sahara or Antarctica
• spend a week without your phone or sleeping on the floor
• be the richest person in the world or the most beautiful person in the world
• study physics or literature
• be a shop assistant or a doctor
• live by the beach or in the mountains
• celebrate your birthday every week or never celebrate it again
• live right next to a stadium or an airport
• be too busy or be bored
• be able to breathe underwater or fly

4. Don’t stop talking

This is one of the best speaking fluency activities for ESL students to use if your lower-level learners still don’t feel comfortable speaking English. The purpose is to let them have a simple conversation with a partner, without worrying about accuracy, and enjoy the fact that they are able to communicate in a foreign language. Put your students in pairs and tell them they will talk about a topic you give them for two minutes. Tell them the point is to keep the conversation going, and that they can say whatever comes into their mind. That means they can share their own opinions and experience, but also ask their partner questions. You, the teacher, want to hear them speak English and that’s all you ask.

Some possible topics for the two-minute conversations include: weekends, food, films, pets, birthdays, shopping, family, cities, travelling, school. If you want to make it more interesting, choose some of these less obvious topics: carrots, socks, dolphins, dentists, headphones, windows, jars, islands, queues, coffee.

5. Is it something we have in common?

This simple activity creates lots of opportunities for students to ask questions. The following are some examples of what you might say to your students about yourself. You can obviously adapt the sentences so that they are true for you.

• I always listen to classical music in the car.
• I have four pairs of trousers.
• There is a lamp in the corner of my bedroom.
• I’ve had two cups of tea today.
• I finish work at 7 on Thursdays.
• I went abroad twice last year.
• I can make lasagne and sushi.
• I was at a friend’s birthday party last weekend.

After hearing or reading one of your sentences, students talk in pairs or groups to establish if it is something you and they have in common. It probably isn’t, so they will get one minute to modify the statement so that it is true for the three of them. This will require either asking their partners questions (e.g. Where do you listen to music? Do you listen to classical music? Do you always listen to something in the car?), or talking about their own experience, e.g. of listening to music and going places by car, until the other students decide that it is also true for them. (There might be students who, once they realize a sentence is untrue for all of them, will simply turn it into a negative, or change the beginning to ‘My English teacher…’. Make sure they know that is not what the activity is about.)

If you want your students to practise asking questions more, have a look at this lesson plan.Fluent speaking is arguably the most desirable skill for English learners. At ESL Brains, we always try to give it priority in the lessons we design, but it ultimately depends on you, the teacher, how much speaking practice your students are given. How do you create speaking opportunities in the lesson? Which of the no-prep speaking fluency activities for ESL students will you use to help your students communicate better in English?

‘Authentic’ materials are created for fluent speakers of a language, rather than for language learners. But more and more often teachers are realizing that real-life resources can be successfully used both in ESL lessons and outside the classroom to develop students’ language skills. The internet provides an endless source of videos and articles which, as you will see below, can benefit both you and your students.

Students are more likely to engage in up-to-date topics 

With the world changing at a remarkably rapid rate, new and exciting topics are constantly springing to life. Students love sharing their opinions on these changes, as they impact their everyday lives. Authentic videos and articles on up-to-date topics can be used to spark a conversation, as well as introduce, practise or revise any aspect of language. They are a rich source of input and ideas that can be talked over in the lesson. See how it works in the Metaverse lesson, where students watch videos on different aspects of life in metaverse and share their opinions on the idea, but also practise the use of intensifiers.

Students should be exposed to real-life English

Being exposed to authentic language builds students’ confidence. They stop seeing English as a completely ‘foreign’ language, and gradually immerse themselves in it. They are therefore more likely to engage in conversations with other English speakers outside the classroom, which is the main reason why many of them learn the language in the first place! A well-designed lesson based on authentic materials will use the real-life language from the video and create opportunities for students to use it in different contexts. Check out the It’s kind of my favourite stuff lesson plan in which students not only watch an authentic video for listening comprehension, but also use the vague language learnt from it to describe their favourite things.

Even lower-level students can benefit from real-life videos. ‘Aren’t these too difficult for them?’, one could ask. Well, they might be. But so what? It is OK that they don’t understand every word from a video, because that is exactly what happens outside the classroom! They need to get used to hearing the language and, rather than trying to understand every word, they should listen for gist. It’s a perfect way to help them overcome their fear of language immersion. What‘s more, authentic materials can be used as a prompt for eliciting specific answers, like in the ‘You’re kidding!’ and other quick responses lesson.

Coursebooks don’t always provide what your students need

Coursebooks can be a great help when it comes to establishing the structure of a course, but they might lack what your students need at the moment. The topics that textbooks cover are sometimes outdated or simply not adjusted to quickly-changing reality. Authentic materials are a great way of supplementing these deficiencies. Take the Functional language for online meetings lesson, for example. It uses a funny video to teach what is of the utmost importance for any student working in English nowadays.

Textbooks don’t always revisit topics or grammar constructions taught at lower levels. But even if they do, each group of students is different and has different needs. So don’t hesitate to use authentic materials to revise topics which have not been fully understood by your students in the past. What we do and why we do it is a lesson aimed at A2 students, but the language addressed in it often turns out to be a challenge for higher-level students as well.

If you find yourself teaching students of a certain profession, there might not be a coursebook meeting their language needs. This is where real-life materials come in handy. If your students work in IT, try the lesson about blockchain. Are they in HR? Why do we glamourise overwork more than ever? will spark a great discussion on employees’ wellbeing. Do they work in logistics? Check out the How smart can a warehouse be? lesson plan. Are your students engineers or architects? Use the lesson about micro living.

Authentic materials create an excellent opportunity to turn a seemingly boring aspect of language learning into something fun

Grammar is often labelled as dull by students. The good news (for them, as well as you) is that a grammar lesson doesn’t have to be limited to gap filling exercises. Using authentic materials can turn it into something enjoyable and interactive. They will show students that grammar is an essential part of language because they will be presented with broader contexts for its use. For example, learning how to use comparative and superlative adjectives while sharing opinions on old and new technologies in the Better. Faster. Stronger lesson can be a real hit! And if your students hate reported speech lessons, use the Practise reported speech with Vogue interviews lesson plan to show your students how useful this grammar construction can be.

Reading in English could become a habit for your students 

From reading the news to researching a topic of interest to finding a perfect cake recipe, your higher-level students can do it in English rather than in their first language. They just need to develop the habit. The amazing thing is that making your students read in English is easier than it has ever been, given the range of topics available online. The only obstacle is their reluctance, as it is challenging and takes more time. You can help students overcome these difficulties by using our Critical Reading Club lessons. Try Are we lonelier than ever? and other CRC lessons to encourage your students to read in English outside the classroom.

ESL Brains is more than happy to help you make the most of authentic materials. Find the lessons you need using our search engine or browse through the topics you can find near the bottom of the main screen. Have you been teaching with authentic materials? Tell us about your experience!

Show your students a word once and they will quickly forget it. Make them work with the word, create connections and contexts and use them to think in English, and they are much more likely to use it on different occasions in the future. We have listed six simple vocabluary revision exercises you can use at the beginning or end of a lesson to consolidate your students’ knowledge and make them feel more confident about the vocabulary they learn. The tasks can be used to practise new sets of words, but they are also a great tool for spaced repetition which involves looking back at the lexis studied weeks or even months before, to help embed it in students’ long-term memories. The best news is that the revision ideas require no or hardly any preparation, which saves you time and allows you to use them as often as necessary.

1. Use a list of words to make students recall details about the topic covered in the previous lesson.

A simple ‘What do you remember from the last lesson?’ might not be enough, but showing your students the words related to the topic will jog their memories. While speaking, the students will put the words back in context. It is best to do this exercise in pairs, as it gives students plenty of opportunities to speak. You can simply write the words on the board, or, if you teach online, share them on the screen. See below how we used this idea in the lesson about small talk. The task was used at the end of the lesson, but you could choose to do it at the beginning of the following lesson as well.

2. Use a list of words to make students test each other.

This is another great activity in which the teacher’s preparation is limited to giving students a list of words. In pairs, one student defines one of the words and the other student has to say which word from the list their partner is talking about. With lower levels, you could ask your students to come up with three words they associate with the target word. The word list for this exercise could include the vocabulary studied in the previous lesson, as well as some words your students learned earlier. The advantage of such revision vocabulary exercises is that even if a student is not sure of the meanings of some words, their partner will help them remember.

3. Use two lists of words to make students incorporate new vocabulary into a conversation.

Prepare two lists of words and some conversation topics your students will use in pairs. The topics should not be directly connected with the lexis. Give each student in a pair their own list of words, or send it to them in a private message. Ask them to use the words while discussing one of the topics. This activity will make students create new linguistic contexts for the words, which in turn will make them more likely to use the words in other conversations in the future. An extra challenge could be to ask the students, once they have finished, to guess what words are on their partner’s list. See below how we used this exercise in the lesson about the placebo effect. The conversation topics were not directly connected with medicine (e.g. the key to success, travelling abroad). If your students are creative enough, you might not even have to prepare the topics beforehand. Any topic will do. 

4. Use noughts and crosses (a.k.a. tic-tac-toe) to make students come up with connections.

As simple as the game might be, it adds a certain twist to the revision routine. The aim is of course to get three words in a line. See below how we used this exercise in the lesson about milk. The students had to say what foods the verb can be used with, apart from milk. The words you choose to practise could have a common theme or be the same part of speech, and the instruction could vary based on the words used. If you choose adjectives, ask students to say who or what is like this. If you choose verbs, ask them to say who or what does it and in what situation. They could also put the word in a sentence, which would be great grammar revision, e.g. for auxiliary verbs or irregular verbs. If you teach in class, give each pair a copy of the grid. If you teach online, share a grid with each pair. If there is a quick winner, the pair can work with the remaining words, too. 

5. Use sets of two words to make students create links.

This activity is useful if you look for vocabulary revision exercises covering different topics. You simply take two random words studied previously and ask your students to think how they could be linked. They might find some connection between them, or create a logical sentence with both of them. If the words are stare and crucial, a possible link could be that when somebody talks about a crucial issue, some people will stare at them. If the words are dishonest and mow, the students could say that a person was asked to mow the lawn but they didn’t want to do it so they were dishonest and said they were busy. Don’t underestimate your students’ creativity here. You might not see any connection where somebody else will find two. Once you have your list of words, pick pairs at random and read them to your students one by one.

6. Create context to make students recreate words.

This idea might require some thinking through at the beginning, but when you get the hang of it, you will never be short of ideas. Ask your students several questions using a target word in each. Tell them to write down simple, one- or two-word answers. The students will then look at the answers and recreate either the whole question, or just the target word. For example, if you want to revise the word disposable, ask your students what can be disposable. Let’s say they write a mask. If it is nudge, ask them what their friends sometimes nudge them to do and they could write quit smoking. Continue with other questions. After finishing, ask them to look at the answers they’ve written and say what you asked about. They will see a mask and remember disposable. They will see quit smoking and recall their friends nudging them. This is also a good activity to study specific grammar points, like verb patterns (e.g. ‘What do you avoid doing?’) or comparatives (e.g. ‘What is noisier than a car?’).

Even short, but regular, revision will help your students incorporate the studied vocabulary into everyday use. Try out our no- and low-prep activities and see what a huge difference it makes to review lexis in the lesson on a regular basis. Let us know how it went. We would also like to know what vocabulary revision exercises you use in your classroom, so tell us what works with your students!

If you are new to ESL Brains e-lesson plans, or have just started teaching online and don’t have much experience with Google Slides, you may find this tutorial useful.  

We’d like to share a few tips with you on how to use our e-lesson plans efficiently, as well as point out some differences and similarities between the structure of our worksheets and e-lessons. Hopefully, this will help you  make the transition to teaching online with ESL Brains easier and smoother. 

Let’s start from the beginning!

Click the ‘e-lesson plan’ button on our website and it will open as a presentation in Google Slides. You can download the presentation as a PowerPoint if you need to edit the slides, but you may have to adjust the content, as some of it may be out of place. That’s why we recommend presenting online in Google Slides!

Key features you need to know

If you’ve been using ESL Brains worksheets, then you’ll already be familiar with comments for teachers in the teacher’s versions (in red font). We use them to suggest extra ideas or alternative ways of approaching a task, explain the meaning of difficult vocabulary or point out language curiosities and extra resources. You’ll find all these extra comments highlighted in yellow in speaker notes at the bottom of the slide.

Speaker notes is the space where we also place timestamps to help you find the answers to some questions about the videos. Occasionally, you may want to replay the video to let students hear the answers again, or even ask them to watch it again at home and write down exactly where the answers are. Some of the answers, which aren’t visible for students on the slides, are visible only for teachers in the speaker notes.

A typical ESL Brains e-lesson plan is very similar to our worksheets in terms of its structure. After an introductory slide with the lesson title, you’ll find the exercises arranged in the same order as in the worksheets, separated by red section slides. 

Section slides not only introduce the next task, but they may also: 

• give teachers extra time to prepare students for the transition to another activity and cool off,
• include a question to discuss (e.g. ‘How much do you remember about reported speech?’) which you can use as a warm-up before the next activity,
• give you the chance to add something extra yourself – maybe your own question or a favourite short activity related to what follows – or refer back to what you’ve just finished and answer students’ questions.

Every new task starts on a separate slide and is followed by a corresponding slide with the answers. 

In our e-lesson plans you’ll often see animations, which we use to reveal the correct answers one by one (most of the time in red boxes or as phrases highlighted in yellow). This way, we give teachers a chance to elicit answers from students first, allowing them some time to make and discuss predictions, and also help focus their attention on specific parts of the lesson. You need to be in presentation mode to be able to see them (check out the last paragraph!).

Whilst guiding teachers through ESL Brains online materials, we mustn’t forget to mention our flipped lessons. A flipped classroom uses a blended learning teaching model where students need to get acquainted with some theory, watch a video or study new vocabulary on their own before coming to class. To help teachers organise their online work, our flipped e-lesson plans are divided into pre-class and in-class activities. You can easily see where each section starts thanks to the section slides in the skipped slides mode which are visible only to teachers and skipped during the presentation. They show you which activities we suggest setting as homework before teaching the lesson, and which should be done in class. 

You can find more information about flipped classroom in our article:

How to use Flipped Classroom for teaching English

As we all know how much students enjoy games and group activities at the end of a lesson, we’ve included interactive versions in our e-lesson plans. For role-play activities, instead of giving a set of cards to each pair, teachers use a role-play slide with buttons (like the one below). You only need to assign one set to each pair and make sure everyone knows which button to click, or send them direct links to role cards. Then, students follow the instructions on a slide which opens in a new window (an equivalent of a role-play card) and complete the task in a breakout room. The interactive role-play cards aren’t visible in the presentation.

In our e-lessons, speaking practice can also take place as a whole-class activity. In turns, students click a box and do the speaking activity, following the instructions on a new slide linked to that box. Then, they click the ‘Go back’ button in the bottom right corner which takes them back to the main slide.

Two different modes of using e-lesson plans

Depending on your personal preferences, you can choose to use our e-lesson plans in two ways: in edit or presentation mode. There are advantages and disadvantages of each. So, what’s the difference?

Edit mode is what you see when you first open a presentation in Google Slides. It allows you to create and make changes to the slides while presenting. You should use it when you want students to complete the activity you’re teaching by moving content or typing into the presentation (just share your screen with them or even give them control over your screen and let them do it themselves). It also allows you to see speaker notes at all times.

Importantly, if you want to use our presentation in edit mode you must make your own copy of it first. If you don’t know how to do this, see the speaker notes on the first slide of any e-lesson plan for instructions.

By clicking ‘Present’ in the top right corner you enter  presentation mode.

This is where information is presented in full screen, without any slides on the side. You can play videos and listen to audio in presentation mode, but students can’t edit any activities or type in their answers. They’ll be able to see the animations, though, which isn’t possible in edit mode.

To be able to see speaker notes, you need to use Presenter view. To do this, click the ‘Down’ arrow on the ‘Present’ button,  choose ‘Presenter view’ and ‘Speaker notes’. This way, your students will see only what’s on the slides, while you’ll have access to the comments for teachers in speaker notes. Presentation mode is also great if you want to share information with your students. 

Ready to start exploring ESL Brains e-lesson plans? Now’s the time to take the leap!

Share your questions with us and, above all, enjoy your online classes!

We’re happy to announce that we are going to create new teaching materials with you: the Critical Reading Club (CRC) worksheets. They are available in addition to all the regular ESL Brains lesson plans on our website, so there will be more worksheets for you to use every month.

The idea behind the worksheets is that students read an article before the class and then discuss its content and share their thoughts in the classroom. Previously, we only shared articles and a few discussion questions on our Instagram account. Thanks to your active participation and feedback, we’ve been able to develop these brand new CRC worksheets.

How does CRC work?

It’s very simple. Before each lesson, you just need to visit the ESL Brains website and copy a link to an article for your students to read.

Then, share the link with your class and set the reading task as homework. The ‘in-class’ part is based on a short worksheet, which typically contains four or five tasks related to the content of the article. The activities focus on some relevant language followed by speaking practice, and they take about 30-45 minutes to complete. It might actually take longer, as learners tend to get highly engaged with some topics!

The articles we curate for every lesson are authentic texts published by reputable online news resources (not adapted!). These original, up-to-date materials in English not only spark discussion, but also serve as a rich source of new language for students to learn. The CRC worksheets do not contain reading comprehension questions such as those often found in ESL course books. Instead, their purpose is to inspire critical discussion while at the same time improving students’ speaking fluency. Each CRC lesson is available in the form of printable worksheets (both teacher’s and student’s versions), as well as an e-lesson plan. 

Why should you get your students involved in CRC?

We’re all aware of the benefits of continuous reading practice whilst learning a foreign language. It stimulates the brain, increases vocabulary and even helps develop writing skills. However, there is often too little time for learners of English as a foreign language to read long texts and do extensive comprehension activities in class. Although we recognise the invaluable role of the teacher in helping students acquire reading skills, we have decided to focus on boosting students’ motivation to read outside the classroom. We want to achieve this goal by selecting interesting and thought-provoking texts as well as designing stimulating questions for in-depth discussions.

How does this lesson model benefit students?

• It helps you make the most of every minute of lesson time. Each class should give students the feeling of having learnt new language while maximising their speaking opportunities. 
• Being able to tackle authentic texts in English will result in enhancing students’ self-esteem and create more interest in exploring the English language and culture on their own. (Just remember, it is your job as a teacher to make sure your students’ language level matches the level of the article you want them to read, so they don’t get frustrated.)
• The ultimate goal is for students to become autonomous, self-motivated language users, in charge of their own learning process. 

What if students don’t do the prep work?

There’s no reason to skip out on Critical Reading Club worksheets if students don’t read an article. You can pair up students, letting those who’ve done the reading summarize for those who haven’t. And if nobody cracks open the article, you can adjust exercises based on extra tips we offer in some worksheets. You can also engage students by making them guess the article’s content from the title which is often sufficient for them to do the rest of the tasks.  And our topics are so captivating students  will jump into discussions even without knowing all the details of the article. Over time, showing up unprepared might lead students to realize the value of completing readings, nudging them to own their learning journey.

You can see all the worksheets here. We wish you lots of exciting and stimulating lessons with our Critical Reading Club!

Every teacher knows the advantages of incorporating group tasks into ESL lessons. Discussions, debates, controlled conversations, games, role play and project work considerably increase the amount of practice for students. They get an opportunity to work independently, which enhances their motivation and makes them concentrate on the task. Groupwork provides more of a natural linguistic environment, reducing stress due to more intimate group dynamics. By helping one another, students discover things together and are likely to complete their tasks more successfully, which in turn boosts their confidence. 

Using group activities with one-to-one classes may not seem particularly exciting or even doable for some teachers. Have you ever wondered how to adapt group activities to provide variety, as well as ensuring your one-to-one students enjoy and benefit from them? Below are a few tips to consider.

BE A CREATIVE PARTNER 

One of the most common activities combining elements of pair and groupwork is debates. Students and teachers love them as they give an opportunity to practise important skills, such as turn-taking or presenting. They can be used not only as speaking tasks, but also as preparation for written assignments. The easiest way to perform this activity in a one-to-one class is by becoming your student’s partner. You may want to try several ideas to add variety to this activity.

Of course, you can just let your student choose to argue a particular side in the debate, but you can also assign them one. It may present an extra challenge, but it can also be a positive learning experience for them to argue on the side of the debate they don’t actually believe in.

On a different occasion, and with a stronger and more confident student, you can prepare five arguments in favour before the class and ask them to come up with counter arguments, setting a time limit. While they are working on their arguments, take the role of a facilitator and guide your student when they need assistance, providing vocabulary, or clarification of the task.

With a weaker student, you can set the topic of the debate as homework and ask them to do research and prepare a few arguments in favour and a few against. Once in class, flip a coin to decide who will be arguing in favour of and against the proposition. That will bring an element of surprise but also boost your student’s confidence (as they’re already prepared!) and increase your chances of sparking an interesting discussion. 

FIND WAYS TO MONITOR AND GIVE FEEDBACK

The role of a teacher during group activities shifts from resource to monitor or consultant in one-to-one lessons. Becoming your student’s partner in group activities, although the easiest solution, makes it complicated to focus on their mistakes and provide them with immediate feedback. One possible way to overcome this problem is by turning a debate into a short speech (one or two minutes, depending on level) on a topic discussed in the lesson, and therefore delaying your feedback. You can either give your student some time to prepare, ask them to improvise or even set a persuasive speech for homework and use it at the start of your next class. Once the speech is finished, your student receives feedback on different aspects of their performance, such as grammar or pronunciation.

But what about activities such as role play, which require interaction? Giving up on doing them would be a shame as they’re a perfect way for ESL teachers to ease students’ transition into using English in real-world situations.

One possible way of including them in a one-to-one class would be by dividing the roles (teacher: employer, student: employee) and recording the role play using a mobile phone. Once it’s finished, you can listen to the recording together and analyse the mistakes (one time you may want to focus on pronunciation, another time on grammar). Make it more memorable by letting your student try and identify their own mistakes first. 

MAXIMISE REAL-LIFE CONTEXT

Apart from being fun and motivating, group activities appeal to many ESL instructors because they broaden the world of the classroom and allow students to rehearse situations they’re likely to experience in the outside world. Implementing this ‘real-life’ context in our one-to-one classes is also possible (and extremely important!). Here is how to do it:

• If your student is quite confident, you could ask them to make phone calls to real places and put into practice what they’ve learnt (this could include making an enquiry about a hotel room, feeding times at the zoo, or even asking a restaurant about their menu). Do it during your class and note down their mistakes while they speak. 
• If they don’t feel ready to talk to strangers yet, switch off your Zoom video and simulate a phone call. It’ll be less stressful, but at the same time, more challenging than what they’re used to. 
• If your student has friends or relatives who speak English, you could ask them to record an interview/conversation with them as homework (putting into practice the language you worked on in class), then listen to the recording together and comment on strengths and weaknesses. 
• Occasionally, you may want to arrange a ‘surprise call’ and ask a fellow teacher to join your Zoom meeting and talk to your student for a few minutes. Choose a topic beforehand (e.g. ask your student to prepare a few questions about the guest’s job, or make it a debate) and then take a back seat in the conversation and take notes. Afterwards, let your student reflect on the task, ask them how they felt, what caused problems and give them advice. This could be a great activity to help your student understand different accents, parts of speech (ums, ahhs and other fillers), and just hear English being used naturally. 

PUT YOUR STUDENT FIRST

Experimenting with new ideas and adding variety to your one-to-one classes is always worth it, but don’t forget that being sensitive to your student’s needs and their personal preferences is far more important. Reduce your teacher talk and create opportunities for them to speak English as much as possible. At the same time, choose your activities carefully, prioritising a relaxed environment in which your student feels comfortable and confident enough to produce the language. 

We’d love to hear how you make the most of group activities in your one-to-one classes. Please share your ideas below!

There comes a point in every teacher’s career when they want to move away from the textbooks and bring a little spark and creativity into the classroom. Most of our students have already seen tons of printable worksheets and they’ve played lots of interactive language games. However, apart from the typical teaching websites, the Internet offers an endless collection of resources which – when used in a creative way – can serve as useful tools to maximise our students’ learning opportunities. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Disclaimer: We are not affiliated with any of the websites below. We don’t get any remuneration or any other benefits for writing about them. We want to recommend them solely because we think they’re awesome and can help you make your lessons even better.

YouGlish

Do you sometimes struggle to find an example sentence for an idiom or phrasal verb? How can you be sure your students understand its meaning? YouGlish is an online platform which allows you to search for specific words and phrases in a database of video clips from popular films and TV shows.

Apart from facilitating the presentation of new vocabulary by providing more than one context, it also allows students to hear how a word is pronounced, not in isolation like in most dictionaries, but among other words. Students can hear it in conversation, including such characteristics of natural speech as contractions, ellipses or linking sounds.

Youglish also allows you to choose which accent you want your students to listen to and with a little bit of extra preparation, you can turn it into games in which students watch a compilation of video clips showing unfinished conversations and guess the missing parts every time the video stops. (Check out our lesson: ‘You’re kidding!’ and other quick responses)

ESL Bits

How often do you puzzle over how to make listening practice engaging? ESL Bits offers a wide range of good-quality audio content and its audio short stories are an amazing tool to start with. There are lots of benefits of incorporating them into your ESL classroom. They can be used as a lead-in to the topic of the lesson, or at the end as a cool-down or reward. As most of them are under fifteen minutes long, you can easily include them in any lesson plan and some of them are appropriate for almost all levels. The fact that you can adapt the speed for your students is another unquestionable advantage. 

There are also countless activities that can accompany an audio short story which your students may complete individually or in groups. You can prepare a quiz to check how well they understood the plot and have a game show in teams; ask students to arrange the events in chronological order; use the transcript and remove some words and have them fill in the gaps while listening; pre-teach students some words and make sure they understand their meanings and then play the story and have them tick off the words from the list as they hear them. 

Apart from short stories, ESL Bits offers five other sections: classics, novels, novellas, intermediate and advanced material which can be used to encourage extensive reading and listening. 

Kialo

If your goal is to develop your students’ critical thinking skills, then you should try Kialo – a free online discussion platform that can help promote thinking outside of the box. It will give your students the opportunity to really practise their reasoning, communication and collaboration skills.

With Kialo, you set up debates on an interactive tree (for teams or individual users) and invite students to contribute, by adding their arguments for or against.  During the debate, you can encourage them to include hyperlinks to support their arguments and then vote on their classmates’ good ideas. You can also chat with students about their arguments by clicking on them and writing a comment, encourage and congratulate them on good ideas or mark some arguments as wrong and let them know they’ve repeated something that has been said before. 

Kialo enables you to filter individual students’ contributions, which makes it easy to assess their performance when a task is finished. It can be used both synchronously and asynchronously. The former allows students to have an equal chance to contribute and can be used as class competition, while the latter makes it easy to focus on the quality and structure of a discussion (it works really well as a homework task!). Here you can see how we used some of the opinions found on Kialo to inspire a debate about the Universal basic income.

MindMup

MindMup app, which integrates with Google Drive, is really useful as it helps users to create unlimited mind maps and store them in the cloud.

There are many ways in which ESL teachers can incorporate it into their classes. It is definitely a very clear and visually attractive way of presenting new vocabulary. Check out our lesson Is e-sport a sport? to see how you can present new vocabulary related to the same topic using MindMup. It is also a perfect tool to show multiple meanings of a word (like in our lesson Do you feel FOMO? – phrasal verbs with out) or word associations.

Another good idea is using it in an online class for group work planning (for example creating a storyboard for a book or video, or creating an essay outline) as well as brainstorming ideas.

Visual Capitalist

The authors of the last website ‘dream of a world where powerful visuals are used to explain anything and everything’. Their insightful infographics are used by lots of institutions all over the world and should definitely become part of an ESL classroom too.

Do your students sometimes seem too tired to participate in speaking activities? Why not try and make them more engaged by using stunning data-driven visuals from Visual Capitalist.  

You can set up a discussion by asking students to interpret the data presented in an infographic or use it as a lead-in into the lesson theme to spark students’ interest. You can also make it even more challenging and use it in the practice stage, with students interpreting the data and at the same time producing the language studied earlier in the lesson.

If you have already used any of the resources from these websites to create your own lessons, we look forward to hearing about your ideas. If you have just decided to try them with your students, don’t forget to let us know how they worked.