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.
I'd studied French in school, 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.
It made me wonder: What if this approach of practicing simple communication exercises could be done in the classroom?
When I began my career as an English teacher, I noticed most students struggled to speak — even with up to 12+ years of study.
The students I was teaching showed no progress after two years. And this pattern wasn't unique to ESL education.
I’ve spent the last 10 years answering that question by creating a toolbox of over 100 carefully designed classroom speaking activities.
Why these 100+ activities will get results for your students:
To become skilled at forming (& understanding) spoken sentences, English learners need speaking practice with 3 key ingredients.
The Right Difficulty Level. Activities must challenge learners without frustrating or boring them—aiming for the "Goldilocks zone" of appropriate difficulty.
A Fun and Interesting Challenge. Puzzle-solving & teamwork challenges keep learners engaged and motivated to practice until they achieve progress.
Authentic Sentence Construction. Students must need to construct original sentences for unique situations rather than memorizing & repeating 5-10 phrases.
Because of the wide variety to challenge levels and topics offered in my toolbox of 100+ speaking activities, you’ll be able provide any beginner to pre-intermediate students with all 3 ingredients during every lesson.
How this practice-driven approach works for real students:
Annie is 8 years old.
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.
Forming useful sentences is a language skill that must be practiced until competence is achieved.
The more productive practice students get (at the right level of challenge), the faster they will learn.
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
Maximize Speaking Practice!
Our speaking activities allow all students in a group class to simultaneously practice in pairs, instead of silently waiting their turn to interact with their teacher.
Make 1 v 1 Lessons Extra Fun!
For lessons with just one student that last for an hour or more, these activities will be a game-changer. That hour or two of class-time will absolutely fly by.
Get More Private Students!
Stand out from the competition. Instead of just showing up with a textbook, bring some colorful materials with you to meet prospective students & parents and do a quick demo.
Increase Job Hunting Success!
Always be the best prepared job candidate. Make a powerful first impression by using one of the available 100+ speaking activities for every demo class you teach.
My materials are based on Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), a student-centered teaching methodology backed by over 40 years of research.
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.