ESL activities and games help your students to get involved in the class and improve their English skills. You can use games to reinforce the lessons that you teach in an entertaining way. Some ESL activities can give students practical experience in speaking English, which will help them find success whether they need English for travel or for everyday life.

Ice Breakers
Ice breakers are short conversational exercises that you do at the beginning of class to introduce yourself to the class (if they're new students) or simply warm the class up to speaking English. You can play "True or False" and have each student tell one truth and one lie about herself and let the other students guess which is true and which is false. You can also pass around a roll of toilet paper and ask students to take as much as they want--for each square that a student took, he must say one unique thing about himself.

Role Playing
Role playing is an essential activity for the ESL classroom because it allows students to practice English. You can have students read sample conversations out loud or create their own improvisational situation. You can also pair students up for private work, allowing the groups to write a conversation and then act it out.

Categories
When you have a bit of time to fill, try playing the categories game. You select a category of vocabulary words--such as colors, animals or fruits--and students take turns saying a word that fits into that category. To make this more challenging, have all students beat a clapping rhythm and students must say the word on the beat.

Picture Drawing
Give each student paper and crayons or markers, then tell students to draw a picture. Do this slowly, with students drawing items one at a time. For example, you might say, "Draw a sun in the upper left corner." or "Draw a man wearing a red shirt." After you finish, students show the papers. Usually, the pictures won't exactly match what you said and everyone will laugh about it.

Hangman Variations
Hangman is an easy game to play because you only need a chalk board or a piece of paper and pen. Instead of the traditional hanging man, you can draw a simple sad face. You can also have a man walking toward something dangerous, like a shark--every time students guess incorrectly, the man gets a little closer. If you want to challenge the students even more, write the spaces for each of the letters of the word, but instead of guessing the letters, you give the students hints about the word and they must guess from the hints.