Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) can be a demanding and rewarding career. According to a 2005 article by Yi Yang in the "Internet TESL Journal," teaching English to non-native speakers is the fastest growing federally-funded adult education program in the U.S. Almost 80 percent of non-English-speaking immigrants are adults, many of whom did not receive adequate academic and study skills from schools in their own countries. This lack of educational preparation poses challenges to TEFL teachers. Fortunately, several online resources provide speaking lesson plans and ideas.

Internet TESL Journal
A 2010 article by Nguyen Hue in the "Internet TESL Journal" provides several suggestions to encourage EFL learners to speak during lessons. Students may be reluctant to speak because they feel they do not know enough to do it well. Methods such as giving students more time to do a communicative task, making sure the task is relevant to students' own experiences and tailoring difficulty level to each student's individual abilities are helpful when creating these activities. Other suggestions for speaking lessons include rewarding efforts at speech, even if the fluency is not perfect, and breaking major speaking goals into a series of more easily-achievable sub-goals.

TEFL.net
The TEFL.net website offers a variety of speaking lesson plans, all with the goal to "promote fluency by presenting students with stimulating discussion questions." The "Safety in Numbers" lesson gives EFL students the chance to speak about numbers without counting, and to practice vocabulary words about amounts and numerical expressions. The lesson plan offers suggestions such as having students discuss the meaning of phrases such as numbering pages and musical numbers with each other, or having conversations about which numbers are considered lucky or unlucky in the students' countries of origin. Students can talk about which numbers they remember by heart, or discuss the meaning of statements such as "taking care of number one."

ESL Galaxy
ESL Galaxy offers a selection of interactive communicative lessons to help EFL learners with speaking. Lesson ideas include making verbal comparisons of lists of adjectives, such as "I think dogs are friendlier than cats" or "apples taste sweeter than lemons." Play the "Find Someone Who..." game, which involves providing a list of activities and directing students to walk around the class, asking other students if they "like to do dishes" or "like to eat spicy." In turn, the student who answers in the affirmative must say why they like the activity; "I like to eat spicy food because it tastes good," for example.