4 Excellent ESL Activities to Activate Students’ Knowledge

For many first time English teachers, one of the biggest challenges is creating engaging activities that allow your students to practice the language they are learning. Here are 4 excellent ESL activities to activate students’ knowledge, that Chatteris’ own Primary Tutors love to use in their classrooms.

1. Readers Theatre (Hannah Barrow)
   • This activity aims to promote confidence, fluency, and teamwork. Students will rehearse

     

     and read aloud short drama scripts, with roles being assigned to individual students or groups. Encourage your students to use their voice and body language to convey emotions and the meanings of the words they are reading. This activity is easy to prepare, as only the script is needed, and fun or students as they get to perform! Hannah uses this website to find scripts, but if your students are advanced, maybe they could write their own!

2. Sport Combination (Tiwonge Kondowe)
   • Students must choose two sports, and combine them into one. They will come up with a new name for it and as describe how it is played. To make it more interesting, you can have students work in pairs or teams and present their new sport to the class. You could even have the rest of the class guess the two original sports that were combined! You could adapt this activity to suit the theme of your lesson; combining foods, hobbies, jobs,countries and more!
3. Conscience Alley (Clayton Inglis)
   • After reading a story, students will be split into 2 teams – each representing a different side of a character’s conscience. Then, the teacher poses a question to the character, and each team must brainstorm their side of the debate and convince the character to chose their side. For example “Should the Big Bad Wolf eat Little Red Riding Hood? Yes or no?”. Students then line up opposite the other team, and the ‘Character‘ (a confident student or the teacher) walks down the middle as each side tries to win them over. You can ask further questions and prompts to encourage more discussion and creativity!
4. Character Interviews (Hannah Ipaye)
   • Similar to Conscience Alley, this activity works best after reading a text, but could be done with popular characters from TV or movies that your students are familiar with. Students work in groups or pairs to create 5 questions to ask an assigned character. Then, the teacher or a confident student acts as the character and responds. You could expand this by having the students write about what they learned from the character.

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