English as a second language (ESL) is a program designed to teach English to students who don't speak the language or those who want to improve their fluency. ESL classes cover reading, grammar, comprehension, writing and vocabulary, and are taught in colleges, universities and private institutions. If you're an ESL teacher, you can use a variety of activities to keep your students motivated in class.

Tic-Tac-Toe
One lesson-plan revision activity is a variation of tic-tac-toe that's fun and tests your students' recall. Write 20 questions based on the lesson you want to review, and number them. Have a student come to the blackboard or easel and draw a big tic-tac-toe square. Have another student write on a piece of paper the numbers 1 to 20, corresponding to the questions you've written. Begin asking the student with the numbered paper the first question. If she gets it right, she writes down the answer and the student at the blackboard writes an X in a tic-tac-toe box. If she gets it wrong, you place an O in a box, and you give the student the right answer. The winner is the first to get three letters in a row, and the entire class gets the chance to review the material.

Index Vocabulary Cards
Write words on index cards using vocabulary that you've taught in previous classes, and hand a card to each student, instructing them to write the grammar, punctuation and spelling rules for the word and to use it in a proper sentence. The students then read the sentence aloud to the entire class. Because the word is different for each student, the class will have the opportunity to hear a variety of sentences that will help them with their vocabulary and sentence construction.

Verb Tennis
A good way to review regular and irregular verbs is to write an irregular verb on one side of an index card, and the past tense of that word on the other side. Bring two of your students to the front of the class and hand each of them four cards. The first student calls out a verb to the second student and asks her to say the past tense form of the verb, then the second student does the same to the first student. The back-and-forth goes on for four rounds, and the winner is the student who has the most correct answers. If it's a tie, you can have both students sit and select two new students to play. If there's a winner, the losing student sits and a new student comes up to challenge the winner.

The Hot Seat
Another effective vocabulary activity is to divide your class into two groups or teams, and place two chairs facing your students and away from the blackboard. Instruct each team to select a player to sit in the chairs, and once they're seated, write a word on the blackboard using the vocabulary the class has been taught. The players in the chairs cannot see the word, but their teams can, and the object of the activity is to have both teams describe qualities and attributes of the word to the player in the chair so she can guess the correct word. The first player to guess correctly wins a point for his team, and two new players are selected to guess a new word.