Conversation Questions for the ESL/EFL Classroom. If this is your first time here, then read the Teacher's Guide to Using These PagesIf you can think of a good question for any list, please send it to us. Home | Articles | Lessons | Techniques | Questions | Games | Jokes | Things for Teachers | Links | Activities for ESL Students Would you like to help? If you can think of a good question for any list, please send it to us. If you would like to suggest another topic, please send it and a set of questions to begin the topic. Copyright © 1997-2010 by The Internet TESL Journal Pages from this site should not be put online elsewhere.Permission is not required to link directly to any page on our site as long as you do not trap the page inside a frame. Once we upload a page, the page remains online and the URL will not be changed. How to Describe a Picture in English - Describe an Image - Spoken English Lesson.
250 Quality Conversation Starters: The Only List You'll Need. Here are some great questions for starting a conversation. There are a lot of random conversation starters to get you started and then conversation questions listed by topic. You can start with the random questions or find a topic that interests you. There’s no right place to start, just scroll down to wherever you want and get started! There are tons of ways to use these questions.
The title would have you believe that there are 250 questions, but there are actually more. We have questions about TV / movies / books / music / apps / phones / sports / restaurants / travel / technology / clothes / goals / seasons / holidays / education / food we also have some weird conversation questions. This page and the page “Questions to get to know someone” are also available en español as a merged page. Random Conversation Starters Here are some conversation starters that span all kinds of topics. 1. Always fun to follow up on the question by watching the video they thought was funny. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Picture Based Speaking Activity For ESL/EFL Classes – IDEAS FOR ESL&EFL TEACHERS. I got the idea for this activity after we came across a well-known photograph in our textbook, and I was surprised how many students didn’t know it. Sure, young people are overwhelmed with photos all day long, take Instagram for example, but it is usually photos of celebrities, fashion, food, Starbuck cups, you get the idea. Another thing is that they often have no clue about history although they have to study it at school. What they are more interested in is the future; final tests, university, jobs, family. I wanted to teach them something about the past, show them real, raw photos that deal with many issues that still resonate today. I recommend using this activity with students 16+ as the photos may be disturbing for younger students.
I hope you find it useful. Download the photos in PDF format>>>>>>Iconic Pictures Teacher’s Sheet>>>>> Iconic Pictures Teacher’s Sheet Student’s Sheet>>>>> Iconic Pictures Student’s Sheet Other speaking activities you might want to try: Like this: Improve your English using Youtube. La famiglia reale degli accenti britannici - Babbel.com.
Se chiedete in giro com’è l’inglese britannico, le persone vi nomineranno la Regina Elisabetta o Harry Potter. La verità è che sono veramente pochi gli inglesi che parlano come la sovrana d’Inghilterra e il suo accento (conosciuto come "Standard English", "Inglese della BBC" o "Received Pronunciation") è ormai piuttosto raro. L’intonazione, tra l’altro, cambia enormemente a seconda della parte dell’isola in cui ci si trova. La maggior parte dei britannici parla con accento Scouse (proprio della zona di Liverpool), Geordie (proprio della zona di Newcastle) oppure Wenglish (anche conosciuto come West English, parlato in Galles) e questi accenti riflettono con un certo orgoglio la storia dell’area nella quale si sono sviluppati. Imparare a parlare "l’inglese con l’accento" è certamente il modo migliore per stupire i vostri amici e per aggiungere un po’ di colore alle vostre conversazioni.
Ecco una carrellata degli accenti più affascinanti dei nostri amici britannici. Cockney Scozzese Geordie. English Pronunciation - "The Chaos" by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité. Compelling Conversations Sample Chapters - Compelling Conversations. Chapter 7: Being YourselfFrom consulting charts and reading palms to taking personality tests and reading self-help books, people love to describe themselves.Open PDF >> Chapter 10: Making and Keeping FriendsWe all want good friends.
How does one make good friends? Share your ideas about friendship with your partner.Open PDF >> Chapter 26: ChangeEveryone has to deal with change. Sometimes it's fun; sometimes it's hard.Open PDF >> Chapter 43: Crime and PunishmentCrime – from burglary and bribery to car theft and murder – continues to hurt our society. Discuss your experiences, share your ideas, and explore possible solutions with your classmates. Open PDF >>Buy the Print Edition from AmazonCompelling American Conversations Chapter 3: Making and Breaking HabitsHow well do you know your own habits?
Chapter 3: Being HomeEverybody lives somewhere. Nomination Cards: Giving students a chance to speak – tekhnologic. Nomination cards can be used in discussion activities as a way to give all students a chance to speak. It can be a difficult balance trying to facilitate and maintain discussions in the classroom. You have to think about dominant students, shy students, students who don’t know each other, students who feel that they belong to different social groups, students who feel once they have said something their part in the discussion is over and students who are reluctant to talk.
It’s difficult and if the teacher involves themselves in the discussion, the students will look at them to lead it. Students need to learn how to nominate each other, how to ask each other for their opinions and how to involve everyone. You can assign roles to students, or give them an activity to practice these skills. I tried a nomination activity out and it worked extremely well. The activity is based on card games, not games like poker, but games that have special cards or cards that give the player an ability.
Controlled oral practice in ELT – what happened to drilling? [This article was originally published as What happened to drilling? In the BELTA Bulletin in October 2014. It’s available on-line for BELTA members here. It’s reprinted here with the permission of the editor.] As communicative language teachers we are told that drilling is bad. We’re told it is pointless, uncommunicative and deprived of any meaning. It also makes our classes teacher–centred. Before you jump on the bandwagon and continue the rant, I’d like you to pause for a moment and ask yourself whether drilling really has to be so horribly boring and uncommunicative as we are repeatedly told. In this article I’m going to first look at eight common criticisms of drilling and controlled oral practice (COP) and show why they are not all together accurate.
Let’s then look at the criticisms. Criticism: Too much emphasis put on accuracy, hindering the development of real communication skills. Having dealt with some of the most common criticisms, let’s look at examples of COP. T: midday T: she. SPEAKING PRACTICE – ESL prezi. Speaking practice for the CAMBRIDGE PROFICIENCY (CPE) EXAM. Speaking practice for the CAMBRIDGE ADVANCED (CAE) EXAM. Speaking practice for the CAMBRIDGE PRELIMINARY (PET) EXAM. Speaking practice for the CAMBRIDGE FIRST (FCE) EXAM. No Teleprompters Here: 5 Reasons Your Students Should Present From Up Front (And How You Can Help Them) How often do your students do presentations in class? Some teachers shy away from them. After all, many ESL students panic just as the thought of standing up front. And students in a panic aren’t students who can speak well. Few students enjoy speaking from up front in class. It doesn’t come naturally. But just because your student’s don’t like talking from up front or they feel they are not good at it does not mean you should shy away from presentations in class. 5 Benefits of Having Your Students Up Front in Class 1Speaking PracticeWhen students present from up front, they get uninterrupted speaking practice, and that isn’t always easy to come by. 6 Ways to Help Students Present There are plenty of ways you can help your students present from upfront.
Make sure they are presenting about something that interests them. Presenting from up front might not be your students’ favorite way to use spoken English, but it is a valuable experience for them and their classmates. Instant download. Get Organised! Collaborative Speaking Tasks | Tim's Free English Lesson Plans. Image credit: www.organisemyhouse.com Follow me on twitter @RobbioDobbio This is a speaking lesson plan designed for teenagers that focuses on various exponents of suggesting, offering, agreeing and disagreeing. The main aim of the lesson is for students to improve their collaborative speaking skills, it will work well as preparation for FCE/CAE speaking exams. You will need the powerpoint and teacher’s notes below: get-organised – Powerpoint Get organised Teachers notes Teacher’s notes The class is loosely based on Willis’s Task Based Learning in that students are given the opportunity to repeatedly practice a similar task and hopefully internalise some useful exponents for collaborative speaking.
Put students into groups of 3, it would also work with pairs but 3s are ideal. Show the 2nd slide of the power point. Note: This is a good opportunity to teach the difference between “will” for decisions in the moment of speaking and “be going to” for a future intention. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” Kids and speaking. A reason to speakMake sure that the children have a reason for speaking, for example, they need to talk to their partner to complete a picture or to find information in order to make a graph.
Think about the questions you ask in class. If you ask ‘Is this a pencil?’ Children can only respond either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And of course you already know it’s a pencil so the question isn’t real. Play or say the tongue twister then tell your students that they are going to repeat the sentence bit by bit after you. Teacher: sea shoreStudents: sea shoreTeacher: by the sea shoreStudents: by the sea shoreTeacher: sea shells by the sea shoreStudents: sea shells by the sea shoreTeacher: She sells sea shells by the sea shoreStudents: She sells sea shells by the sea shore Have your class repeat the whole tongue twister slowly and then more quickly after the version on LearnEnglish Kids.
Setting up speaking activitiesMake sure that children know what they have to do. BusyTeacher.org Mobile. Experienced learners have probably covered many of the ‘classic’ ESL topics, so they’ll be confident when talking about school, work, sports, friendship and the like. There’s nothing wrong with these subjects, but it’s a good idea to advance beyond them, even if (and especially when) your assigned textbook doesn’t. Once you’ve gotten to know the class quite well, carry out a poll or hand out a questionnaire to discover their level of interest in different topics.
Tabulate the results, consider your own interests and the topics which are most suitable for students of their age and level, and choose a handful to take further. I’ve been fortunate in being assigned to the same groups of students for many weeks, sometimes months, and this useful familiarity lets me tailor content for just the group I’m working with. 1The EnvironmentYour students will likely have a head start here, as climate change has made its way into most intermediate or upper-intermediate level textbooks.
Stories waiting to be told | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC. The three image types have one thing in common; they need someone to interpret them, to fill the gaps, to pick out the details or to open them out into a bigger picture. The first is close ups. I think close-ups are particularly useful, not for what they show, but for what they don't show. This is where the language lies, in exploring and explaining and telling the story that lies beyond and around the image. Here is an example of a lesson based on a simple close-up photo. The first step is to make sure I have a camera with me when I’m out and about at the weekend - in my case this simply means having my phone at the ready – and taking close up shots of places or moments that have some kind of special significance for me.
There are lots of different directions we can take from here, depending on the class, their needs, their energy levels, their interest - and maybe too the teaching agenda. The second type of image I like, for very much the same reasons, is shadows. By Ceri Jones. Time to Talk - EFL Magazine. How much talking do your young learners do in class? We know that children love talking in their mother tongue – in fact it can be difficult to get them to stop at times – but getting children to talk in English is a challenge in many EFL classrooms. Some children are reluctant to talk in English due to shyness, especially when speaking in front of the whole class. Other children may lack confidence in their ideas or in their ability to use English to express themselves.
Using the strategy of Talk Partners, where each child works with a set partner to rehearse language and to share ideas, is an easy and practical way to build children’s confidence and encourage them to talk in English. This strategy gives children more thinking time and allows them to try out language and test ideas in a familiar and safe environment. As a result, they are more willing to take risks with their language, answer more open-ended questions and produce more extended responses. Setting up Talk Partners. GOING GRAPHIC: 4 SQUARES FOR BETTER SPEAKING. Silentium est aurum (“silence is golden”).Or is it?
If we google “teaching speaking in English”, we’ll get over 66,300,000 search results with numerous tips, fabulous games or tricks how to get learners speaking – all pointing out the same frustrating tendency showing that many learners are either timid speakers reluctant to participate in any conversation, or that despite mastering the language, as attested by a great number of grammar and vocabulary exercises thoroughly done by the learners in class, their speaking still lacks fluency and coherence. The latter is sometimes ignored at lower levels. However, speaking is about both fluency and coherence. Coherence is about linking ideas together – just like in a paragraph or essay. This means organising what you say so that your answer is “a whole“.
All the bits within it fit together. This blog post gives some ideas on how to help learners organize what they say into a coherent speech using the Four Square Method. What do we start with? Online tutors.
Let’s Play Grocery Store: Shopping Activities for ESL Students | Washington English Center. English conversation phrases and expressions for speaking practice.