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 collection of speaking activities will turn students into confident speakers of English because:
They all* have an engaging problem to solve, so they stay interesting and students are happy to practice again and again.
With over 100 activities that provide context for learning 1250+ words, students can build a fantastic foundation for B1 learning.
The pair-work & group-formats of all activities means that EVERYONE in a class of 1 - 40 students can be simultaneously practicing English.
Every activity has a very clear “successful outcome,” so students will ask for help or self-correct when they can’t communication correctly.
*The only exception to this are the Survey-Taking Activities, which are best for one time use, and are a great way to introduce new vocabulary/sentence pattern content to an entire classroom at the same time.
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 / food categories and 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.
“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
