Activities For Adult Beginners

Test each other on each other
You can do something similar to the activity above by students testing each other on what they
know about their classmates. Again, if they dont know third person s yet they can take on the
role of their classmate when they ask the questions and so answer them with I and My
Tennis
If you have taught students pairs of words like she- her, England- English or act- actor,
you can get them practising them by one person serving one of the root words and the other
trying to return serve by saying the matching word.
The clap clap clap game
Students sit in a circle and all clap three times. The person whose turn it is should say a word that
hasnt been said before in the category you are practising, e.g. months, jobs, countries or colours,
on the fourth beat. This continues until someone says something that has been said before or
pauses too long.
Test each other on the text
Another thing that you cant do with very low level students is have very interesting
comprehension questions for reading texts. You can partly make up for this by having students
test each others memory on what was written in the text, e.g. names, times they do things, jobs
etc. If they havent studied third person s yet, you can do the same thing but with the person
answering the questions taking on the role of the person in the text.
Disappearing text
Another fun memory game with short reading texts and dialogues is to delete the text one word
at a time, with the student whose turn it is reciting the whole thing from the words left on the
board and memory and then choosing the next word to be deleted.
Say it happily etc
Low level students can need quite a lot of drilling and reading out of dialogues, which can
quickly get boring and anyway they might have a negative impression of due to having done it in
their previous, unsuccessful attempts at language learning. One way to liven it up is to ask them
to do the same dialogue with different feeling in their voices such as bored and excited.
Their classmates can then guess which feeling they were trying to do and/ or compete to make
the most extreme version
Dialogue substitution chains
After students have read out a short dialogue together, ask them to read it out again but changing
one piece of information (without writing it down) such as a name. The next person reads it out
with the last persons change and making one more change themselves, e.g. a time. This
continues until students cant remember the previous changes or cant think of any new ones
Match the questions and answers pairwork dictations

Matching questions and answers (How are you? Im fine, thank you) is a tedious but perhaps
necessary exercise at this level, but one you can add some more interest and speaking to. Give
one student a worksheet with all the questions, and the other student a worksheet with all the
responses mixed up. Without showing their sheets to each other, they have to match up the
questions and answers by reading them out and agreeing which ones go together. You can add a
puzzle element and therefore some fun to this by the letters that represent the responses making a
word (e.g. (t)(a)(b)(l)(e)) when they are written in the same order as the questions.
Gapfill pairwork dictations
This is another boring task that can be livened up by giving the gapped sentences to one student
and the missing words mixed up to the other student and getting them to match them up as
described above.
Shouting dictations
Any pairwork dictations can be livened up by sitting each person and their partner far away from
each other so that they have to speak loudly to make themselves heard above their classmates
(who will also be speaking loudly).
Listening activities!
5. Act Out Scenarios in Role Play

Come up with scenarios for students to act out in front of the classroom. For example, if the
lesson for that day is on Introductions, consider the following brief script:
Student 1: Hello, my name is Jacob
Student 2: Nice to meet you, I am Mary.
Student 1: Nice to meet you too.
After having two students volunteer to act out the scene in front of the class, ask the rest of the
class comprehension questions. This activity works well with a wide range of lessons such as
restaurant etiquette, job interviews and food/cooking.
6. Read Aloud in Class: Partner Gap-fill Activity
Reading aloud is an oldie but goodie. Reading in front of the class can encourage students to feel
confident about reading, speaking and listening to English. This is often practiced with popcorn
reading, where students pop in and out, taking turns reading in a random order.
Another way to give students fantastic listening practice while reading aloud is a partner gap-fill
activity. Have students sit in pairs, and then give each partner their own copy of the text sample,
either A or B (A pair is comprised of one A and one B).
Although the text sample is the same, the A and B worksheets are not. Each worksheet has
blanks in different places. Where A has a blank, B does not. Pairs take turns reading aloud their
full sentences, so that their partner can fill in their blanks. The students should continue doing
this until they have no more blanks!
Note: This is also a great activity to practice spelling. Before starting, make sure students know
how to ask questions like, How do you spell ~? and Could you say that again?
http://www.rong-chang.com/ne/es/es120.htm

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Activities For Adult Beginners

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Test each other on each other

Match the questions and answers pairwork dictations

5. Act Out Scenarios in Role Play

6. Read Aloud in Class: Partner Gap-fill Activity

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