Skip to main content

50 speaking activities for the classroom

I thought I would compile a list of types of pupil speak in the classroom. Many games can be subsumed within the activity types below. I know you can think of more.
1. Whole group repetition or phonics activity (including whispering, shouting, singing)
2. Part group repetition (small groups, rows, pairs)
3. Reading aloud individually or as a group from text on the board (good for sound - spelling link)
4. Reading aloud from a worksheet, homework task or text book
5. Answering a question with hand up (e.g. from picture, picture sequence, structured question)
6. Answering a question without hand up
7. In pairs, taking turns to say a word, phrase or sentence until someone runs out of ideas
8. Playing a guessing game in pairs (e.g. guessing what your partner did last weekend, playing "battleships") 9. Doing an information gap task in pairs (e.g. completing a schedule or diary)
10. Making up true/false statements (in pairs or for whole class)
11. Making up false utterances to be corrected by partner or teacher
12. Lip reading in pairs
13. Speaking spontaneously to a time limit (or get partner to time you as far as you can go)
14. Speaking into a microphone/digital recorder and listening back
15. Giving a presentation to a partner or in front of the class
16. Chanting or singing verb conjugations or vocabulary themes
17. Correcting false sentences made up by the teacher
18. Oral gap filling (teacher reads aloud leaving gaps to be filled in)
19. Singing along with a target language song
20. Miming guessing games (e.g. "dumb customer")
21. Task oriented discussion activities (e.g. murder mystery or solving a complex problem)
22. Speed dating pairwork
23. Complex whole class games (e.g. Alibi)
24. Paired dictation, including running dictation
25. Pupils asking the teacher questions
26. Pupils acting as teacher in front of the class and running oral work
27. Making a simple request (May I go to the toilet? may I take off my jacket? Can you repeat please?)
28. Repeating or responding in a language lab
29. Reading out numbers (e.g. bingo or Countdown)
30. Chanting or singing the alphabet and numbers
31. Playing aural anagrams with a partner
32. Describing a simple picture for a partner to draw
33. Taking part in an oral assessment
34. Playing Chinese Whispers
35. Practising or rehearsing for an oral test
36. Formal debate
37. Presenting and videoing a news broadcast
38. Performing a sketch or playlet
39. Role playing (e.g. parent and child situations, crystal ball, agony aunt, palm reading)
40. Describing a picture and making up a story from it
41. Planning a visit in pairs or as a group
42. Spot the difference pictures discussion
43. Making up a story one word at a time
44. Word association
45. Fizz-buzz with numbers
46. Doing word sequences e.g. say a word beginning with the last letter of the previous word
47. Guessing games (e.g. guess the flashcard, Je pense à quelque chose)
48. Accumulation games (e.g. Je vais au marché et j'achète...)
49. Simple transformation drills (present to past, present to future)
50. Substitution drills (teacher gives a sentence, pupil changes one element)

Comments

  1. Thank you for this comprehensive list Steve! Very useful!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,