Over 100 ESL speaking activities that build English speaking skills fast!
Printable English-as-a-second-language speaking tasks for 45+ learning topics.
Why do so many ESL students never make much progress in spoken English?
Hi, I’m Natsun.
Early in my career as an English teacher, I noticed most students struggled to learn speaking — even if they had as many as 12+ years of study.
I'd also studied French in school myself — and after 6 years of classes, I could only recite a few memorized phrases; Japanese and Chinese classroom study proved similarly ineffective.
My Chinese didn’t begin to show improvement until I was in Beijing and started giving myself communication challenges to complete outside of class: ordering food, buying essentials—daily tasks that I could practice again-and-again until I mastered them.
Slowly, over a couple of months, my ability to form sentence and make myself understood, began to get better. My listening comprehension, slowly but surely, got better too.
And that’s when I started thinking…
What if there was an easy way for students to get the same type of English speaking practice in the classroom?
I’ve spent the last 10 years answering that question by creating a toolbox of over 100 carefully designed classroom speaking activities.
This toolbox makes it easy for teachers to provide students with the opportunity to practice speaking English until they can confidently form (and understand) a wide variety of sentences.
Every one of the 100+ speaking activities in the toolbox has a very clear communication goal that it is easy for students understand.
When the communication goes wrong and the communication goal isn’t successfully completed, the students can figure out what went wrong and fix it in their next attempt.
And because all of the activities provide fun challenges and puzzles to solve, students of all ages are more than happy to practice until their spoken English actually getting noticeably better.
How does this practice-driven approach work with real students?
Annie is an 8 year old student that I recently began teaching.
She’d already received in English classes in school for years, but couldn’t even answer the question “How are you?” or form even basic sentences.
Her vocabulary was limited to colors and a few other words.
She had zero listening comprehension and couldn’t understand anything anyone said to her in English.
She had no interest in studying English.
Practice-driven learning changed everything for Annie.
First, I taught her 17 animals and got her talking with a simple, but fun Deduction Challenge that used 2 basic sentence patterns.
Then I introduced various food ingredients and then used them with a slightly more advanced task with 6 sentence patterns.
Finally, after learning a few shapes, Annie was ready to succeed at this more advance speaking task using over a dozen sentence patterns.
This whole process took only twelve lessons.
As the video shows, during her 12th practice-driven English lesson, Annie is already tentatively forming meaningful sentences using nouns, verbs, adjectives & numbers.
Not only is her English already better than my French (despite my 6-years of classes), but her English has also made progress faster than my Chinese — even when I could the opportunity to practice every day with Chinese native speakers in Beijing.
When students are able to practice speaking English with tasks that have the right level of difficulty and involve having fun solving interesting challenges, their speaking skills quickly improve.
With my collection of hands-on classroom speaking activities, your students will learn to confidently…
form sentences with a solid foundation of 1250+ high-frequency English vocabulary words.
utilize an essential collection of sentence patterns that can communicate almost anything.
apply the most crucial pluralization and verb conjugation grammar-points flawlessly.
“While residing in rural Asia, I used Playguistics® to help my daughters learn English – and it really worked! It’s fun, clever, and makes learning a new language feel very natural.”
-Dr. Roel Bolt from The Netherlands
Download 100+ ESL Speaking Activities for Only $36
Add Authentic Speaking Practice to any ESL Lesson
Simply log into the members’ area, click on a topic or a difficulty level, choose an activity, and then download all required materials.