An ESL teacher always needs to get his students speaking and listening to English. As we all know, our students many times don't hear English outside of class. Many immigrants work and live with people who don't speak English. Classroom activities that challenge a student's listening and speaking skills are essential. Try the following activity to get your students interacting and practicing English with one another.

Write out ten sentences on a piece of paper that include vocabulary and grammar covered in class. Cut out each sentence so you have ten slips of paper. Each slip of paper will have a unique sentence on it. Have your students sit in rows of five to six people back. You can decide how many rows there are going to be and how many students in each row by looking at your class numbers. This activity will work with large and small classes.

Now, explain to the class that the first person in every row will be getting a slip of paper that contains a sentence in English on it. This person's job is to read the sentence and turn the paper face down. He now turns around and whispers the sentence to the student behind him. This student listens and immediately turns to the next student and does the same thing. Once the last student has heard the sentence, he is to say it out loud to the rest of the row and to you. As the teacher you will tell him if he is correct or not. Many times the sentence that the last student recites is very different from the original. That is OK. Write the original sentence on the board so students can see what it was supposed to be.

If you have a larger class you will have to move around the room to attend to each group. When one row is done with a particular sentence give it to another row. Let your students have fun and get carried away. Most people can't help but laugh at themselves during this activity. Even though everyone is having fun, and most likely getting a little loud, there is important English practice occurring. Each student will concentrate extra hard on pronouncing their sentence correctly and listening to their classmate's English. I've always had fun with this and I bet you and your class will too.

Andrew Lawton
http://drewseslfluencylessons.com