You’ve probably seen some of these activities demonstrated at ESL teaching conferences or on some internet sites or on YouTube videos with titles like: “The 10 Best Speaking Activities.” The activities are usually promoted as a way to get students to talk. However, professional teachers don’t assign activities just to get students talking. They try to make sure that students are developing some specific technique or conversational strategy during the activity. There are ways to make these activities more than just talking, and there are ways to alter them to facilitate conversational skill-building, and there are ways to format them to be more stimulating for the students.
In this posting (Part 1), I’ll discuss three of the six activities, and in (Part 2), IMPROVING Six Popular ESL Activities: Making Them More Than Just Talking PART 2 I discuss the other three.
The postings will have two sections:
Section 1: I’ll describe the activities
Section 2: I’ll describe conversational skills that students could apply during the activities and three different ways that you can model the conversational techniques which they should use during the activity.
Section 1: Activities
Her is a link to a short video where you can see a demonstration of how this activity works and more explanations about its many improvements over traditional 20 Questions: Video A Better Way to do 20 Questions
Common Sense Teaching ESL 