The teaching of English as a second language, or TESOL, requires that educators use a range of exercise formats and styles to engage students' interests and expand their abilities. For an effective TESOL lesson, look for a variety of approaches to your target material, designed to suit the specific needs of your students' learning styles and strengths. While there are millions of potential activities, you can select from several principal activity types for a well-balanced lesson.

Collaborative Activities
A fundamental challenge for TESOL is to provide learners with sufficient practice time conversing in English. To round out the time that students spend listening to the teacher, provide plenty of collaborative or group-based lessons; this will demand that students speak and listen to one another. Instead of using an open class format, breaking the class into groups ensures that each student gets more speaking time. Setting each group with a specific task will not only aid the students to improve their understanding of target vocabulary or structure directly related to the task, but it will provide a common motivation for the students to converse naturally. In this way, collaborative activities can encourage good conversational skills more effectively than designated conversation activities, with more formulaic question-and-answer formats.

Drills
While "drilling," repetitively practicing a specific point, is an incomplete means of language learning, it does serve a highly useful purpose within the TESOL classroom. Balancing naturalistic language activities such as collaborative or conversational work with drills will help students to deepen their familiarity with new constructions, making them seemingly "automatic" to produce. For speaking drills, you might have students repeat a short, formulaic dialogue, such as basic introductions. Substitution drills have students repeat a specific form, changing one or more variables. For example, students might drill the form "I can" plus an infinitive verb: I can play tennis, I can cook or I can read.

Listening Practice
Listening activities, particularly those using recorded conversations or reports, can prove challenging to many TESOL students. Incorporate plenty of repetition and pauses into your listening activities; this will allow you to use the most challenging and naturalistic listening materials appropriate for your students' level. For example, you can train students to understand conversations that include interruptions and background noise by providing preparatory pre-listening questions, repeating the recorded conversation several times and playing it back in short bursts.

Student-Led Exercises
To engage students in a lesson as fully as possible, give them an active role in the direction of the exercises. For example, when creating an in-class review activity for the chapter you have just completed, have your students generate the review questions themselves. When designing an interview activity, have the students write the questions as well as the answers. When breaking into groups, have the students decide how to divide into groups, using the group decision-making as a mini conversational activity. Letting students lead will not only encourage them to take more responsibility for their learning, it will create more opportunities for practice time.