Another set of popular vocabulary game based on Taboo. This time, Christmas vocabulary. You know the drill, download, print, cut, and let your students have some fun while learning.
These conversations topics and questions will help any learner practice and master speaking English. Age or level of English doesn’t matter, what matters is practice, practice, practice.
So here you go, find a speaking partner, choose a topic and have fun!
Starting a conversation
1. Current situation
How are you doing?
How’s the job?
How’s the family?
How was your weekend?
2. Job / Work
What do you do?
How long have you worked there?
Do you like it?
How are your coworkers?
What’s the best / worst thing about being a (their job)?
3. News
What do you think about (current news story)?
Did you hear about (news story)?
How much do you follow the news?
What do you think doesn’t get enough news coverage?
What gets too much attention in the news?
How do you get your news?
4. Sports
Do you like (sport you like)?
What teams do you follow?
What was the last game you went to?
What do you think about (popular player / team that is doing well)?
Do you play any sports?
Who do you think will win the (major sports event)?
5. Not too distant future
What are your plans for the weekend?
Where are you planning to go for your next vacation?
Do you have anything exciting going on this week?
Getting to know someone
1. Free time
What do you do in your free time?
How much free time do you have?
What do you wish you had more time for?
2. Music
What kind of music are you into?
What music did you like when you were younger?
What’s your favorite band / singer?
Have you been to any concerts recently?
What’s your favorite album?
3. Movies
What type of movies do you like?
What’s your favorite movie?
Who’s your favorite actor / actress / director?
What’s the last movie you saw?
4. Food
What’s your favorite food / ethnic food / restaurant / thing to cook / seasonal food?
Do you like cooking?
How do you usually find good restaurants?
What weird foods have you tried?
5. Books
Do you like reading books?
What types of books do you like?
What’s the last book you read?
What’s your favorite book?
What book is overrated?
Are there any books you would really recommend I read?
6. TV
What shows do you watch?
What do you think about (popular TV show)?
Have you seen (TV show you like)?
What are some shows that ended that you were really into?
What show do I really need to check out?
7. Travel
Where have you been on vacation?
What did you like / dislike about (place they traveled)?
Where do you wish you could go?
What place do I really need to see?
What’s your favorite place you’ve been?
8. Hobbies
Do you have any hobbies?
How long have you been doing them?
How did you get started?
What common misconceptions do people have about your hobby?
What hobbies did you have when you were younger?
9. Learning / Studies
What kinds of things do you pick up easily?
What subjects were hardest for you in school?
What kinds of things are you interested in learning more about?
Talking about personal stuff
1. Where they grew up
What was your hometown like?
Did you enjoy where you grew up?
How much did where you grew up shape you?
What were some of the best and worst things about where you grew up?
2. Things they were into
What games did you play as a child?
What kind of hobbies did you have when you were growing up?
What cartoons or shows did you watch when you were a kid?
What fads or interests were you really into when you were younger?
3. Friends
Do you stay in touch with your old childhood friends?
What do you usually do when you hang out with your friends?
Do you prefer having a lot of friends or just a few close ones?
How long have you known your best friend?
How did you and your best friend meet?
4. Accomplishments
What accomplishment are you most proud of?
What awards or trophies have you won?
What is the next big thing you want to accomplish?
5. The distant future
What do you think life will be like in 10 / 25 / 50 / 100 years?
Do you think humanity is headed in a good direction?
What discovery could be made that would completely change the course of humanity?
Can we teach communicative competence without critical thinking? Is the topic of vaccination or chemtrails too controversial? Try this ESL role-play on science and let me know what you think.
Cristina’s blog offers a vast array of resources including listening tasks, discussion topics, grammar and vocabulary exercises, various lesson plans and many other activities.
I guess everyone knows this one. Most of the resources are available only through a paid subscription, but there are also many free lesson plans and activities.
Another well-known website with plenty of English teaching resources which include kids, teens, and adults. They also offer training courses and resources for teacher development.
ESL worksheets and lesson plans. This website also offers mainly paid resources and various types of subscriptions, but they have also plenty of free resources.
I have one more week of teaching ahead of me. Three more weeks of work. There is more paperwork now than actual teaching. The kids can smell the summer holidays in the air and it shows. The teachers can barely hide how exhausted they are.
And it’s hot. Scorching hot. No AC in the building and my brain is shutting off. All I can see is myself on the beach, sipping a gin&tonic. But the kids still need to be educated. Motivated. Engaged. Entertained.
The perfect time for some fun speaking activities. Group work. Games. Anything. It’s too hot to be creative. I am thankful for any useful activity I can find so I put together a couple of fun ESL activities that I’m using these days. The kids are happy. My head didn’t explode. Win-win.
This activity is based on a popular board game. It is a more fun variation of a dictionary game I sometimes play with my students. They get a couple of difficult words and have to invent fake definitions. This game is the most popular among my kids.
This one is still popular. Revising vocabulary is always a good idea. There are plenty of different topics you can choose from. You can try our free games on the topic of Media or Business. Other topics include Health and Food.
The best thing about these fun ESL activities is that the variations are endless. You can either find some or have your students create their own. It’s more fun and they also learn more. Just give them a topic, have them write 10 questions and after that, they circle the class and interview as many classmates as possible. Finally, they inform the class about the results. Topics may include Environment, Hobbies, Books, Travel, Science, History, Media, Celebrities.
You can also find some interesting ideas in this article from Lessons Plan Digger, which inspired me to write this list.
For even more communicative activities, click below.
I came across a funny article about ridiculous complaints by spoiled holidaymakers. That inspired me to create this little worksheet/activity. I used it as a warm-up activity for my students the next lesson in which we covered writing complaints – holiday edition 🙂
Teacher tip: If they can’t come up with any own ideas in the second task, let them use some ideas from the list.
In pairs read the ridiculous complaints holidaymakers made to their travel agent.
Which is the craziest one? How would you have answered if you were in the place of the travel agent?
Why do you think people complain about these things?
Astonishing holiday complaints
1. “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”
2. “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels.”
3. “The beach was too sandy.”
4. “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food at all.”
5. “It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ‘siesta’ time – this should be banned.”
6. A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she’d been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.
7. “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white.”
8. A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.
9. “We bought ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses for five Euros from a street trader, only to find out they were fake.”
10. “Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined, as my husband spent all day looking at other women.”
11. “No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled.”
12. “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It only took the Americans three hours to get home.”
13. “I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends’ three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller.”
14. “I was bitten by a mosquito. No one said they could bite.”
15. “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the accommodation’. We’re trainee hairdressers – will we be OK staying there?”
16. “There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners now live abroad.”
17. “My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”
18. “We had to queue outside with no air conditioning.”
These complaints are all taken from a survey from Thomas Cook and ABTA, revealing the most ridiculous complaints holidaymakers made to their travel agent.
Task 2
Think of two similar ridiculous complaints.
Role-play the dialogue with a classmate.
Student A You are an unsatisfied holiday maker and you are going to complain!
Student B You are a holiday representative and you try to be as polite as possible and explain the misunderstanding.
I often use various picture prompts for discussions, simple photo descriptions, storytelling, short warm-ups, fillers.
I used these two quite recently when discussing fashion. You can either have the students compare the photos or to create a short story for each of them.
This TedTalk ESL video lesson is based on a talk by Dao Nguyen. In this video she is talking about how media spreads online and the technology and data that publishers can use to understand why.
How do you decide if you should share something that you see online?
How do you protect your privacy on the Internet?
VOCABULARY
Read the sentences and try to work out the meaning of the underlined words/phrases.
Last year, some BuzzFeed employees were scheming to prank their boss, Ze Frank, on his birthday. They decided to put a family of baby goats in his office.
Ze kept on getting delayed: he went to get a drink, he was called to a meeting, the meeting ran long, he went to the bathroom
But it performed so much better than we had expected. What was it about the goats in the office that we didn’t anticipate?
The following week, armed with the additional knowledge that food videos are very popular, we dressed two people in hazmat suits and wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded.
It wasn’t the biggest live video that we had done to date. The biggest one that we had done involved a fountain of cheese.
This is who I am. This is my upbringing, this is my culture, this is my fandom, this is my guilty pleasure, and this is how I laugh about myself.
This is the group of jobs that makes me feel something — makes me curious or sad or restore my faith in humanity.
Turns out that this quiz went extremely viral among a group of 55-and-up women who were surprised and delighted that BuzzFeed determined that they were 28 and 5’9″.
This quiz was successful not because it was accurate, but because it allowed these ladies to do a very important job — the humblebrag.
One brainstorming session involved the job of bonding. So, could we make a recipe that brought people together?
Match the words/phrases (1-14) to their explanations (a-n).
to prank
to delay
to anticipate
hazmat suit
rubber band
to involve
upbringing
to restore
to turn out
delighted
determined
humblebrag
session
to bond
to pretend to be complaining but in reality to be proud of something
to bring back
the way a child is raised
to expect or predict
a meeting
to form a close relationship
to happen in a particular way
to play a practical joke on someone
to have a firm decision or a strong desire to do something
a circle of elastic rubber
to have or include as a part of something
a suit that protects against hazardous materials
to make someone late, not on time
very pleased
TED TALK VIDEO
Watch the video and answer the questions.
What animal did the BuzzFeed employees put in their boss’s office as a prank?
Why was their boss (Ze Frank) delayed?
Why was their Facebook Live experiment video so successful?
What are some of the “jobs” that the content is doing for the reader or the viewer?
Which “job” did the video about baking involve?
According to the speaker, which questions are important to answer if we want to create better content?
Have a look at our communicative activities. Click on the picture below.
