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ESL Speaking Activities and Exercises

  • Successful English language speaking exercises are perhaps the most interesting and enjoyable  part of teaching ESL.
  •  Interacting and engaging with students and getting students to interact with each other is possibly the most rewarding and fulfilling part of a language teacher’s job.
  • However, this requires lots of different kinds of speaking activities.
  • Some activities only work well once with a class and many activities can only be used to teach a specific aspect of grammar, language function or speaking topic.
  • It’s great to have a huge library of activities that can be accessed quickly and easily to solve potential difficult teaching situation. Some of my favorite speaking activities are included on this page.
  • Also, see my my post explaining how to use artificial intelligence to create speaking activities:

Speaking activity collections

6 sentence starter speaking exercises

14 elementary to pre-intermediate create-a-conversation exercises

5 elementary speaking activities

9 super elementary speaking activities

11 role play  and interview speaking skills worksheets

11 debate and discussion brainstorming and speaking activities

15 personality and vocabulary speaking activities

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5 Complaints and annoyances speaking activities

Food and restaurant speaking exercises

Environmental issues vocabulary and speaking exercises 

Travel & culture vocabulary & speaking exercise

 Job interview  vocabulary and speaking  exercises

Video speaking activities

Introductions conversation

Food conversation

Routines conversation

Going out to a movie

Arranging a meeting

Checking into a hotel

Calling to complain

Ordering in a restaurant

Present perfect questionnaire

Other speaking activities

Note: Some of the PDFs won’t open straight off the page. This is because they are older pages and the websites don’t meet Google’s new security criteria. However, I think they are mostly fine. They are just older pages. Right click on URLs and copy/paste them into the browser and they should open easily.


Talking about roommates speaking exercise (PDF)

Speaking activity about breaking things (PDF)

Talking about slang (PDF)

Getures:kissing, hugging and shaking hands worksheet (PDF)
Telling stories vocabulary, pictures & speaking exercise (PDF)
Discussing power worksheet (PDF)
Useful things vocab. & questions (PDF)
Talking about annoyances (PDF)

Talking about success (PDF)
Hurry,rush collocations with  vocabulary and speaking exercise (PDF)
Explaining accidents (PDF)
Talking about fashion, trends and hobbies (PDF)
Talking about restaurant problems – worksheet (PDF)
Talking about cities (PDF)

Travel problems vocabulary and  speaking exercise  (PDF)
Talking about office problems (PDF)

Speech outline worksheet (PDF)

First and Last: A speaking activity (PDF)

Speech outline worksheet (PDF)

First and Last: A speaking activity (PDF)

Discussion communication activity- editing a magazine (PDF)Find someone who..activity (PDF)

New Friends bingo for students (PDF)

Language function (compare,cause/effect, chronology) question cards (PDF)

Eternal Mingle: a first meeting icebreaker activity

Frequency Adverb Drill
Timed Pair Practice for Fluency
Find someone who… likes and dislikes. An ESL speaking activity
Tic tac toe game for routines
There is/there are speaking exercise & game

Fashion vocabulary exercise & discussion questions (PDF)
“What people do for fashion” discussion worksheet (PDF)

Consumer Complaint Menu Roleplay
Cool Jobs – A Debate Roleplay Lesson Plan
Celebrities and their contribution to society speaking lesson

Giving opinions about  sports (PDF)

Giving opinions about the weather (PDF)

Giving opinions about the city (PDF)

Finding a roommate discussion & speaking 
exercise (PDF)

Introduction & interview on familiar topics (PDF)

A collection of esl survey worksheets  incl. topics such as dating, alcohol, shopping, marriage sports (PDF)
Interview your classmate about his/her life (PDF)
Travel sentence starters (PDF)
Short list of sentence starters (PDF)

Ask your partner questions to complete the chart (PDF)

Asking about habits (PDF)

Asking about the future (PDF)

Pairwork interview exercise (PDF)

University schedule info gap exercise (PDF)

How long does the ferry take ? (PDF)

What are you going to do this weekend? (PDF)

Urban complaints guided conversation lesson (PDF)
Expressing likes and dislikes with  gerunds &
infinitves worksheet (Word)
Jobs & adjectives partner interview worksheet (PDF)
What do YOU think about….? describing situations
Speaking lesson using -ed adjectives
Group speaking exercise for debate expressions
Pairwork speaking activity for discussing probability in the future
Adjective class survey lesson
Find someone who… is interested or interesting. An ESL speaking activity
Have you ever..? interview exercise: get with a partner and share some of those painful memories.
Guessing game for large groups with pictures for present continuous

Finish the Sentence
Discussion cues: Giving opinions with feeling