ESL games are an important, almost vital, part of the ESL classroom. Instead of acting out different syllables, students just make the action that corresponds to the word. When they do that, all the other students must copy them. This game is played with two or three teams, and one student from each team sitting at the front facing away from the board. If not don’t worry though – just prepare the questions ready to read out, and draw the points grid on the board in class. This student says a category of personal preference (e.g. Congrats, you're now a member here, too. Another popular warmer (again for intermediate and advanced students) is based on the TV game show ‘Call My Bluff’, in which students have to guess the correct definition of an obscure word from three possible options. Well sure it’s definitely for a more relaxed session, but it’s a fantastic surprise treat for those more active students, and a great way to wake them up on a sleepy afternoon. ESL Lesson Plans for Adult Learners. Players will have a lot of fun trying to target their classmates by guessing what experiences they have had! Top Development Courses ... conversation, speaking activities, and more! You can use... 10 pages in total. If you need even more ESL activities, then you’ll need to check out my book, 101 ESL Activities: For Teenagers and Adults. Why not try playing as a warm-up activity, either to see if students remember what was learned in the last session, or to refresh knowledge relevant to today’s class? pets, sports, green foods). TV game shows are a great source of ideas for ESL games for adults, and one of the easiest to implement is the classic British programme Countdown. This student chooses another person to do a challenge. They say one item from this category, then the student to their left has to say another item. It’s a great alternative for lower-level students, who are not yet confident/skilled enough to produce descriptions. This student has to name five luxury items they would want if they were stranded on a desert island. No microphone was found. ESL Opinion Activities. Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) can sometimes be boring and other times intimidating. To be clear, we’re just borrowing the scoring system from the Jeopardy, not the gameplay method of giving questions as answers as well! You may well have seen the ‘Heads Up!’ app or the related segments on the TV show ‘Ellen’ – check out the clip below for a (clearly very excited) Harrison Ford playing. Simply choose five topics your class has studied recently, and write five questions related to each of them. This is great because students have to think of multiple words, but are also rewarded for more obscure vocabulary. We all have times when we need a more relaxed, light-hearted activity – as a time-filler after a tough test for example. Perhaps the most popular is Password, a game in which students guess vocabulary words from single-word clues. • Prepositions include the verb to be, nou... Would you like to become a member of iSLCollective ? Adults. If you want to make vocabulary memorable and fun for your students, be sure to try out these ESL vocabulary activities for adults. While they may be able to think of more difficult vocabulary, the time constraint makes that less prevalent, and there is an element of luck in which words other teams choose to write. Each question in a topic category is worth a different number of points; teams choose a category and points value which reveals their question, and are awarded that number of points if their answer is correct. To allow, click the icon on the right of the address bar or go to Chrome Settings. Normally it’s best to limit possible words to a given vocabulary category to make guessing easier. What I have been struggling with, was finding suitable online activities for more advanced students that would not be more of the same exam practice or grammar fill-in exercises. One common issue is the time it takes to prepare suitable those ‘taboo’ words for each vocabulary word – but luckily we’ve created an interactive Taboo game which automatically presents them alongside the main vocabulary word, for a variety of different categories. The key feature though is an element of the original Scattergories game, in which only unique answers are worth a point. Speech Recognition is not supported by this browser. The student mouthing the word also practises enunciating clearly and correctly. Write or project a word on the board – our interactive Password game has suitable pre-prepared words you can use. This is the 3rd part of my set which I created to practise the verbs with prepositions and to measure the knowledge of my ss. It might just seem like a bit of fun, but the game actually practises an important skill. We use cookies to enhance your experience. How to Teach an ESL Conversation Class. When students have finished their description, their classmates have to guess whether they were describing truthfully, or inventing something completely different. Countdown works particularly well as a warm-up activity for a class in which there’s likely to be a few latecomers. Taboo is most commonly played like Articulate, with one student describing for their team, as it makes it easier to spot the use of outlawed words. Students all raise a hand with their outstretched four fingers and thumb representing five lives (“like Mario” usually helps get the concept across!). Have them download a voice recorder app onto their phones, and allow students to interview one another. If you liked these fun English games, you’ll love using Your Agora in the classroom. Use the latest version of, Get the latest ESL resources in your inbox, Enter your email address below to receive our newsletter, Teaching vocabulary? They will have to correct either a spelling error or a punctuation error. They will help you to reduce teacher talking time in your classes and increase the amount of time your students are doing the hard work! In the classroom we simply replace these strange objects with random pictures, shown to a student at the front on the computer. With these adult ESL actvitieis, students will get the chance to interact with others through role playing, as well as answering questions about themselves. When you are teaching beginners, it’s easy to come up with simple games to incorporate into your lessons. The material is intended to be suitable for upper-intermediate and advanced classes. Each worksheet has a a number of exercises highlighting and practising vocabulary and grammar points in the article. We use cookies to display relevant ads and monitor traffic, helping keep the site free. It also has the advantage of being shorter if you’re looking for a very quick warmer, and can work with just two or three students too. All of your experience could be with teaching children, or this could be your very first adult ESL lesson ever. We’re currently working on a great interactive Jeopardy game with pre-made categories, but for now JeopardyLabs is a great tool for creating your own games if you have a projector. By registering to and using our site, you agree to our use of cookies. If a student has done an activity, they lose a life. Optionally, you could also ask those students to give a specific experience in the past simple, e.g. If you have more time however, you could ask the teams to prepare words and definitions themselves first. They’re guaranteed to take teaching vocabulary from the normally tedious to fun, engaging, and … Password; One TV show that stands above the rest when it comes to ESL games for adults is The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. How can that be suitable for the classroom?? In the original version, players have to complete twelve categories with a single word (all beginning with a predefined letter). In this game students silently mouth words or phrases to their teammate(s). Reading Comprehension Practice for Advanced ESL Students. There are two options for implementation. Because they’re forced to use synonyms instead of the obvious words, it helps practise a wider set of vocabulary. Conversation questions and idioms. Plus it’s a good opportunity to correct common mistakes like “I have never been in Paris“. The student describes what they would do if they were in power for a day (using grammar appropriate to their level). Student Level: Intermediate, Advanced Age Group: Kids, Adults [printfriendly] Weather Forecast ESL Activity Preparation: To prepare the weather listening activities, browse YouTube for some authentic videos from weather broadcasts. Present ten words as a quiz, with teams scoring a point for each correct guess. A ton of ESL teaching awesome found here! In a clockwise directions, the students take turns saying their preference. This student gets to ask any other student a question, and they have to answer (within reason!). No speech was detected. While in Articulate students come to the front and describe for their team, in Heads Up the team describes for one student who can’t see the words (‘reverse Articulate’). Top 19 ESL Speaking Activities for Adults Without further ado, here are the best conversation activities and games for adults if you teach English and need a few ideas. It can be a bit of a challenge, so it’s best played with higher levels, but students often get really into it, and it’s an ideal game for more reserved students. You can also use it to practise modal verbs of possibility (e.g. Many of us will have played Charades as a party game, but the ESL class version is slightly simplified. app itself is fun for advanced students, but often comes up with obscure words – that’s why we’ve created our interactive Articulate game, especially designed for English classes. After all, if you don’t know where the verb, subject, object, adjectives and adverbs go, how can you have any chance of making a coherent English sentence? The great thing about Jeopardy is you can use it with almost any language topic, and its adaptability makes it the ideal choice for a review class. We have several free ESL writing lessons on this page, including sample essays, sentence patterns, writing assignments, and more! The team with the most valid words in a given category wins a point for that round. Student Level: Intermediate, Advanced Age Group: Kids, Adults [printfriendly] Weather Forecast ESL Activity Preparation: To prepare the weather listening activities, browse YouTube for some authentic videos from weather broadcasts. Our last category game is one that never fails to go down well, Name Ten. This is a game for ADVANCED students - PART 1. In that case the game Stop is more suitable, because students race to think of only one word in each category (with six categories this time). This is a great extension once students are comfortable with this type of game, and a really fun warm-up activity. Plus the students who arrived on time are rewarded in their score as they’ve played more rounds! They take turns picking a card, with the resulting action determined by the rules below: One of the games that’s often included in Kings Cup deserves a special mention as a standalone activity – Never Have I Ever. They’re a particularly good choice as ESL games for adults because they’re fun without requiring too much movement, or spotlight on individuals. These sites are multilevel, with reading, writing, discussion, pronunciation, and vocabulary activities. Many sites are free or offered for a nominal charge; the school might want to … The winner is the last player with a life left. Players take turns selecting a consonant or a vowel to produce nine random letters, and from these letters they have to make the longest word they can. All of the activity and game ideas that we include can be used in low-resource classrooms and require little to no preparation time. Many of the segments they use are great fun to play in class, and work particularly well as warm-up activities. 8 pages of prepositions with sentence examples on an advanced level C1 or C2. Dictionary Activities for the ESL Classroom A Presentation for TESL Canada Presented by Jeff Gulley October 13, ... From the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. ESL Games for Adults from Jimmy Fallon. We hope you’ve found this list of ESL games for adults useful and enjoy playing them in your English classroom! As students are describing a picture, the game also doubles as a way to practise that skill, including the correct use of prepositions. The idea is that instead of players having to drink beer when a ball lands in one of their cups, they have to complete an English challenge (answering a question, naming vocabulary, fill-in-the-blank etc.). They could even include example sentences for each option. I have never gone skiing. ESL Worksheets for Advanced Students (Teens & Adults) Check out these worksheets on different topics for teens and adults or advanced students. You could source your own images, but the easiest way to play is using our Box Of Lies generator. Mundane topics that deal with the everyday aspects of life are fine at lower levels of proficiency, when vocabulary might still be limited, but an Advanced Learner, especially an adult, is less likely to enjoy a lesson on What I did on my vacation? On the TV show players are shown a strange object in secret, which they can choose to describe truthfully, or invent a different description. There’s also the option to choose idioms or random sentences for more advanced/experienced students. However, you may need to get creative with adults to ensure you're not asking them to engage in speaking activities that they may find childish. A slightly different type of game played on Jimmy Fallon is Box Of Lies. Students then swap papers and score points for each word written. Browse EFL / ESL activities for a wide range of grammar and vocabulary topics, covering all of the four skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). Another enjoyable segment you can use as a vocabulary-based warmer is ‘The Whisper Challenge’. The last student to raise their hand has to do a challenge. Click the microphone to try again. For a quick warm-up activity, pre-prepared definitions work best, and our interactive Call My Bluff game is ready to use for this purpose. Just choose the one that fits your needs... (By the way, I upl... 6 pages of essential every day idioms including a definition and sample sentence. The teams then take turns giving a one word clue (for example for dolphin, “animal” or water”), followed by a guess, until a guess is correct. I created this set to practise the verbs with prepositions and to measure the knowledge of my ss. They’re fun and engaging, but are chosen to match the needs and sensibilities of older students. sports and hobbies, emotions and feelings, health problems etc. You could make these challenges yourself, but that’s a lot of work; a better way is for students to write use their textbooks/notes to write them beforehand, a review technique in itself. These games are designed to get students to repeat targeted grammar structures. Our interactive Whisper Challenge game allows you to do this, and even plays background music to mask any whispered sounds. For a variety of suitable pre-prepared challenges, try our Challenge Generator. There are more than a hundred ESL games and activities for beginner to advanced students. Vocabulary games and activities In pairs they write 12/20 of them (depending on the number of cups you have) on small pieces of paper, then swap sets with another pair to play. Unlike other online tools this gives you the option to set the time allowed to one minute instead of thirty seconds (as in the TV game show), the latter being too difficult for all but the most advanced students. There are nine pages of tables reviewing all the fundamental points. This is repeated round the circle until one student can’t say an item, or repeats a previous item. And, it’s not just for an advanced ESL conversation class, but the activities are also ideal for beginners or intermediates. A collection of English ESL worksheets for home learning, online practice, distance learning and English classes to teach about advanced, advanced Filter our English activities by student level, or a specific grammar or vocabulary topic you are teaching. Ensure that a microphone is installed and that microphone settings are configured correctly. Go to 101 ESL Activities on Amazon. The problem with that is you’re missing out on an extremely valuable learning tool. Give students between 5 and 10 minutes to come up with a list of questions—for an advanced class, between 7 and 10 questions should be enough, as the questions should be open-ended. The last student to touch the floor has to do a challenge. Possible topics include the seasons, favorite movies and hobbies. That student has to do a challenge. I went to the Alps last year. ESL Sites. Tags: advanced, beginner, grammar, intermediate, kids, vocabulary, warmer. Check these ideas for engaging and fun ESL lesson activities which you can use to easily create your own worksheets. For example, write four or more questions on a topic on the white board. Learn the latest in advanced ESL lessons—quickly teach advanced ESL grammar, conversation, speaking activities, and more! This student can put their thumb on the table at any point during the game. Ask students to stand up an… Reverse Charades is a guessing game in which players give clues with actions and gestures. (This is good practice for the speaking part of exams such as IELTS, TOEFL or TOEIC.) Not only are English games a fantastic way to review recently learned topics, they’re the perfect warm-up activity, a great refresher after a period of more intense work, and even a reward once your students get to know and love them! Vocabulary category games are really popular with any age group, and perfect as a no-prep warmer. For a variation of this exercise, make photocopies of your list of questions. This is too difficult for beginner/lower intermediate students, so try words that start or end with the same letter instead. ESL Writing Exercises: Activities, Worksheets, and Ideas! Search. I hope you enjoyed my ESL activities for advanced students! As in Scattergories, students draw category columns on a piece of paper. On the flip-side, sometimes beginners don’t have enough vocabulary knowledge to think of lots of different words. One TV show that stands above the rest when it comes to ESL games for adults is The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Available in a Variety of Formats. The cards are arranged face down in a circle, and the students sit in a circle around them. :) Please wait until page is refreshed! If you like this ESL speaking activity, then you’re going to love this book: 101 ESL Activities for Teenagers and Adults. The first student to lose all three lives has to do a challenge. Stand up in front of the class with a partner and present something together. However, all the students have to hold their breath from the start until they answer! It’s nearly impossible! In Charades one student stands up and acts in front of the class, which might be fine with kids, but you don’t find too many adult learners who are eager to do that! This is repeated round the circle until one student can’t say a word, or repeats a previous word. Posts include fortune telling, comparing adjectives and stand up if you’ve ever…, as well as classic ESL games and activities like find someone who and alibi. Like Jeopardy, you can adapt the language topics to anything you’ve been studying recently, so it’s perfect for a review class. You then give them a ‘random’ letter – you may want to select an achievable one for your categories! You can use it as a warmer, and/or to practise talking about experiences in the present perfect simple. If any student has had this experience, they lose a life, and put a finger down to show that. Not only is this game suitable for all levels, it’s less likely to be dominated by stronger students. Some popular sites are Dave’s ESL Café, ESL Gold, and ESL Galaxy. Stand up in front of the class and speak. Never too many idioms. Prepositions Board Game -Easy and Advanced Versions. As such the game lends itself to practising particular types of vocabulary, e.g. This student thinks of a vocabulary category (e.g. However, not only does that require you to think of lots of different categories, it doesn’t provide an extensive test of vocabulary knowledge, and makes the game less reusable. This can suit students who aren’t comfortable describing alone in front of the class. Don’t miss the opportunity to review recently learned or upcoming topics by using them as categories! Level C1.1. In each round students think of ten words in one vocabulary category in one minute, without any specified first letter. The last student to copy them has to do a challenge. ESL games for adults Grammar games and activities. With advanced learners, finding activities that are fun, engaging, and deeply beneficial gets a lot more challenging. Not all games are created equal either – we have to make sure we choose the right ones for our audience and classroom set-up. A Little Myth About Dictionaries ... Oxford ESL Dictionary With Canadian Content . You may need to adjust your microphone settings. To help you do just that, we’ve produced this list of the best ESL games for adults. The students take turns (in a clockwise direction), saying words that rhyme with that word. Lip-reading is a significant element of interpreting speech, especially in noisy environments. Beer Pong you say? They then take turns saying things that they have never done, but they think their classmates have, e.g. If you can get your hands on a deck of cards, then Kings Cup (also known as Ring Of Fire) fits the bill perfectly. The students take turns saying things they have never done, but they think others have. While in a kids class almost any game will go down well at any point, ESL games for adults should be carefully planned, related to current class work, and have a clear language goal in mind. #17: Parts of Speech Activities for ESL. The Internet is full of fun and eye-catching games for younger learners or even low-level adults. Not only is it a fun competitive activity, the way in which it gets students thinking about language and related words is ideal for the start of a class. Although some students are happy to play at any time, many either don’t want to make a fool of themselves in front of others, or in their view waste class time. Many of the segments they use are great fun to play in class, and work particularly well as warm-up activities. Be part of a group presenting a drama or role-play in front of the class. The teams take turns reading out each other’s word sets, and as they do so you write them in those columns, or cross off existing duplicates as appropriate. Just be aware that in many of these instances players use gestures as well, which should be outlawed in this classroom game (for an gestures-based guessing game see Reverse Charades below). Our collection of advanced level ESL lesson plans and resources. A companion blank worksheet ... A workshhet for more advanced students. d) Children under ... as business travelers often “sacrifice local collective activities and instead priorities their immediate families when returning from trips”. English writing is ALL about parts of speech. All the images and activities you can see in the post are taken from our English Work Series Package, which are 5 x 60+ minute ESL Vocabulary Lesson Plans for advanced students and adults 25 MP3s + Transcripts + Speaking & Writing Exercises + Expressions & Vocabulary + Teacher Answer Key Make things more complicated by adding words that students can’t use in their descriptions! Normally each word guessed correctly is worth one point for the team, but you could also play non-competitively if you think your students would prefer it. Why ‘Reverse Charades’ here and not Charades? More ESL Games and Activities. The Time Bomb Hot Potato ESL game is a variation on Hot Potato, using a countdown timer instead of music.