When working with world language classes or English language learners, have you ever asked a question onlyto be answered with complete silence and blank stares?Its a common issuenearlyevery teacher hasstruggled with encouraging students to speak in a language theyre still learning.
A student may have a deep fear of making a mistake, or may be just plain shy, even in their native language.Whatever the reason, here is a list of a few fun activities to get your students to speak. This list is for more advancedstudents.
12 Ways to Get Language Learners Talking
1. Whos Telling the Truth?Have each student writethree facts about themselves that nobody in the class knows on a piece of paper.Make sure each student includes their name on the top of the page.Collect the sheets of paper and bring three students to the front of the room.Read aloud one of the facts that is true for one of these three students.
All three claim that the fact is theirs, and the class then proceeds to question them in an attempt to determine who is telling the truthand who is lying.Each student is allowed to ask one question to one of the three students.After a round of questioning, the students guess who is telling the truth.
2. Variations on the game Taboo: For variation 1, create a PowerPoint presentation witha noun on each slide.Have one student come to the front of the room and sit with their back to the PowerPoint.The rest of the studentstake turns describing the words on the slides, and the student at the front has toguess them.
For variation 2, separate the students into groups of four or five.Place a pile of cards with random nouns in the center of each group.Have students take turns describing a nounfor their group members to guess.The group member who guesses correctly keeps the card, so theres competition to see who hasthe most cards at the end of the game.
Variation 3 is for advanced speakers.Separate the class into two teams. Students are given a word to describe to their teammates, in addition to a list of words that they cannot use in their description.Each student should have two to threeminutes to see how many words their teammates can guess.
3. Descriptive drawing activity:Pair up the students and giveeach studenta picture, placing it face down so partners cannot see each others cards.They must describe the picture for their partner to draw.
4. Comic strip descriptions:Give each student a portion of a comic strip.Without showing their pictures to one another, the students should attempt to describe their image, and put the comic strip into the correct order.After about 10 minutes, the students can guess the order, show one another their portion, and see if they were correct.
5. Secretword:Students are given a random topicand a random word that is unrelated to the topic.The students must hide the word in aspeech about the topictheyre trying to make surethe other students cant guess thesecretword.The other studentslisten carefully to the speech and attempt to guess the secret word.
6. Debates:Give each student a piece of paper with agree written on one sideand disagree on the other side.Read aloud a controversial statement, and have each studenthold up theirpapershowing the agree or disagree side depending on their opinion.Choose one student from each side to explain their position and participate in a short debate.
7. Impromptu speaking:Preparea list of topics that students will be able to talk about.Split the class into two teams, and have each student choose a numberthats the order they will go in. Each student will respond to a statement without preparation.They must continue speaking for 45 seconds.As the student is speaking, the other team listens for moments of hesitation, grammatical mistakes, and vocabulary mistakes.If the other team can correctly identify an error, they get a point.
8. Desert island activity:Give each student a piece of paper and tell them to draw an itemany item. Collect the drawings and pass them out again; no student should receive their own drawing.
Next, tell the students that theyve been stranded on a desert island, and only half of the class can survive and continue to inhabit the island. The only thing each student will have on the islandis the item depicted in the drawing given to them, and their goal is to convince the class that they should survive based on that item.
9. Storytelling activity:Bring four students to the front of the classroom.Three of them should sit in a row, and oneshould stand behind them and act as a controller.Give the controllera stack of cardswith nouns written on them.
The controller will hand a noun to one of the three students, who will start to tell a story.The student continues telling the story until the controller decides to hand another noun to another student, who will then take over the story.
10. Two Truths, One Lie: Each student should write three statementsabout themselves on a piece of paper.Two of them should betrue, and one should be a lie.Students read their three statements, and their classmatesquestion them to try to determine which statement is a lie.
11. True/false storytelling:Give each student a piece of paper with either true or false written on it. Each student should tell the class a story that is true or false, depending on which word they received, and the class must guess whether its true.To add to the activity, you can allow the other students to question the student telling the story.
12. I Have Never...:All students in the class should start this activity holding five fingers in the air [you can use less fingers to do this more quickly].The student who goes firsttells the class one thing that they have never done.The students who have done that activity should put a finger down, and tell the class a story about this activity. A student is out of the game when all of their fingers are down.