A Speaking Game That Will Captivate Your ESL Students

I write a lot about speaking games and activities that can be incorporated in teaching English. After all, speaking is a productive skill that many of our students struggle with. Therefore, every time I try or discover something new, I love to share with you.

In 3 Fantastic Speaking Activities That Will Make Your ESL Class More Exciting, I talk about a few games that you can play to engage your students in speaking.

Today, I am sharing one more game that really got my elementary kiddos engaged and I foresee that my older students (middle and even high school) may be open to it as well.

The speaking game Who? What? Where?

Do you know how a week before any vacation feels like? Slow or fast, there is too much to do, and not enough energy to do it. Both the students and you likely feel burnt out but, of course, since you’re the teacher, you don’t demonstrate it in misbehavior (I hope:).

It was one of those days, when I knew that I had 30 minutes to engage my third graders in a meaningful activity. The activity had to be one  that would allow them to both practice speaking English and learn something new.

Since I was using another teacher’s classroom, and she happened to be an enrichment teacher, I began to look around in the shelves – maybe I will find something that would spark my curiosity?

There it was, a speaking game called Who? What? Where? Perfect for my needs, perfect for my student’s needs.

The speaking game

The premise of the game is beyond simple. There are three stacks of cards. The first one is labeled Who? The second one is labeled What? And the third one is labeled Where? Each student gets one card, which allows them to pretty much form a picture of a story in their head.

For example, a who card says “a dolphin”, the what card gives an action of “is standing on its head” and the where card  says “in the middle of the desert”.

Now the student has two minutes to draw a picture that represents this “story” and once he/she is done, they show the picture to their classmates, who then have to guess what is happening there.

Needless to say, the fun is immense. There is a lot of natural speaking practice going on during the game. Often, the students try to negotiate their own meanings and learn a lot more during the class than initially planned.

Superb speaking practice in English

Once our class was over, I reflected on the “why” the game was such a huge success.

From the English language learning perspective, here are a few ideas for a more targeted speaking practice.

• You can use it to practice sentence structure.

I cannot tell you how many of my students, especially those that come from a language background, which does not follow the English SVO (subject-verb-object) sentence structure, struggle with putting simple words in the right order.

• You can use it to practice yes/no questions

When the students are not sure what they see in the picture drawn  by their classmate or teacher (not all of us are Picassos, allright?), they can ask clarifying questions that yield a response of a “yes” or a “no”. For example, “Is this an animal?”

• Practice synonyms, antonyms and paraphrasing.

If the “artist” needs to give more information to his/her peers about the picture without completely giving out the answer, they can use synonyms and antonyms to explain. They can also paraphrase certain actions that would allow their classmates to arrive at the correct response.

• Practice grammar

As you may have guessed it, this particular game is great for practicing the present progressive form of verbs. Usually, this is the grammatical structure that the students grasp very quickly because it is so widely used. For example, “The shark is singing in the middle of a jungle”.

At the same time, you can use this game to practice any other tense such as past simple or present perfect, although this would likely work better with your older students.

Other reasons for this speaking game’s success? It is communicative and provides for authentic usage of language. After all, speaking another language is how we convey our ideas and when we are able to do it in a natural way, we will become more comfortable with it.

How can your students enjoy speaking games and practice?

Since fun speaking activities are very popular, here are a couple of things you can do.

You can get this game on Amazon, but I think it may have been discontinued and the price might be less than friendly. In which case, preparing a similar game in class with your students could be an added bonus.

You could instruct your students to brainstorm nouns, verbs, and adverbs of location. They could do it individually or in small groups. The students usually like playing the game they helped create, and may even come up with suggestions on how to improve it!

For more speaking activities, ready-made lesson plans, worksheets, and teacher support check out The ESL Teaching Roadmap.

Now it’s your turn:

Have you played this game before? If so, what else could you practice using theses cards?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!