Most ESL speaking activities fail for one reason: they ask adults to have an opinion before giving them anything to have an opinion about. Fix the order. Something interesting first, the language they will need second, and a task with a real outcome third. Then the talking happens on its own.
Most ESL speaking activities fail before anyone opens their mouth
You know the moment. You put ten discussion questions on the board, you say "discuss in pairs", and thirty seconds later the room is quiet again. The usual diagnosis is that the students are shy or too low a level. The real cause is upstream of the classroom, in the design of the material.
Adults do not talk because they have been instructed to talk, which is why ESL speaking activities built on instructions alone stall so reliably. They talk when they have a position, and a position needs something to react to. Ask a forty year old accountant whether she likes travelling and you get four words. Ask her whether her city should cap the number of short term rentals and you get a paragraph, because now there is something at stake.
A question is not a task
Most ESL speaking activities on the market are a list of questions, and a list is the weakest thing on the page. A question invites an answer, then stops. A task has an outcome, so it keeps going until the outcome exists.
| Question format | Task format |
|---|---|
| Do you think remote work is good? | Rank these five jobs from easiest to hardest to do from home. Defend your first choice. |
| What do you think about influencer marketing? | You have sixty seconds to convince your partner to drop a sponsorship deal. |
| Is fast fashion bad? | Choose the one rule you would make law tomorrow, and explain what it would cost. |
Both columns are ESL speaking activities on paper. Only the right one produces more than two turns per student, because ranking, choosing and convincing all end somewhere, while "what do you think" ends whenever the student decides it does.
Give them something to react to, then ask what they think
The order that works is short input first, reaction second. Input can be a hundred word text, a set of five statements, a photograph, a chart, a thirty second clip. It does not need to be long, it needs to be arguable.
Good input has a tension inside it: two things that are both true and pull in different directions. Overtourism is a clean example, because the same visitors that ruin the street also pay for the café on it. When the tension is in the material, ESL speaking activities stop needing a warm-up, since students arrive at the task already disagreeing with something.
The language arrives two minutes before it is needed, not after
Vocabulary presented at the start of a lesson and used at the end has been forgotten in between. Language presented immediately before the task gets used, because there is nowhere else for it to go.
ESL speaking activities rarely need more than six to eight expressions for one task. Choose them by the move you want, not by the topic. If the task is a ranking, students need comparison and partial agreement: "the difference is marginal", "I'd put that last, and here's why", "I see your point, but". The Council of Europe's CEFR Companion Volume describes spoken interaction through exactly this kind of behaviour, in scales for informal discussion and for putting a case, rather than through lists of structures. That is the whole argument for functional language, and it is why we package it as Language Boosts instead of grammar drills.
Ranking beats discussing because someone has to decide
ESL speaking activities that force a decision outperform open discussion with the same group and the same topic. Ranking, choosing three from eight, spending a fixed budget, cutting one item from a list, deciding who gets the last place on a project. Each one creates a moment where two people want different things.
That moment is where the language happens. Students hedge, push back, concede a point to win a bigger one. None of that appears when the instruction is "discuss the following questions", because agreement is the cheapest way out of a discussion and adults take it. Our Speaking Challenges are built entirely on this principle, with one mechanic each and no question lists.
Pair work dies the moment both students agree
Watch a pair that agrees. Two sentences, a nod, silence, and then a polite look at you. Agreement is not a failure of the students, it is a failure of the task to distribute positions.
Three ways to prevent it, all quick, and all of them turn ordinary ESL speaking activities into something with friction. Assign the position rather than letting students choose it, and let them argue a side they do not hold. Give each student different information, so neither can see the whole picture. Add a constraint that makes the easy answer unavailable, such as removing the option everyone was going to pick. A Quick Talk works well here as a fifteen minute filler that already has the imbalance built in.
Correction belongs after the task, on the board, in their own words
The quickest way to kill a good task is to correct the student in the middle of it. Fluency and accuracy compete for the same attention, and interrupting a student who is finally arguing about something teaches them to stop arguing.
Write instead. While they talk, note four things: two errors that block meaning, one expression somebody nearly used correctly, and one sentence that was genuinely good. When the task ends, put all four on the board without naming anyone, and ask the group to improve the first three. The good one you read out as it was said, because adults remember praise attached to their own sentence.
This is the part most ESL speaking activities skip, and it is the part that turns talking into learning. Ten minutes of talk plus four minutes of reformulation beats twenty minutes of talk with nothing written down.
One to one needs different mechanics than a group
Half of the ESL speaking activities published online assume four students and a whiteboard, which is useless if you teach adults one to one. In a one to one lesson you are the second speaker, and that changes what works.
Take the opposite side openly and say so, so the student knows it is a role and not your opinion. Push for detail rather than for length, since "why did that work" produces more language than "tell me more". Keep your own talking under a quarter of the lesson, and count it once in a while to check, because most of us underestimate it. Teaching adults one to one rewards mechanics with two roles, not activities that need a crowd.
What to run in your next lesson
The fastest upgrade to your ESL speaking activities is to stop assembling them yourself for a week. Pick one full lesson built around a question that has no easy answer, from Big Talks, and run it as it stands. The overtourism lesson asks whether tourism is destroying the places we love, which splits any adult group in about ninety seconds. If you have fifteen minutes rather than an hour, Quick Talks do the same job in miniature, and Collections bundle them by theme.
Materials are level tagged, so B2 speaking materials will give you the ESL speaking activities that fit most adult classes. Everything sits in the shop, and the thinking behind the format is in Talking Point. If you want the wider professional context for all of this, TESOL International Association and Cambridge English are both worth an hour of your time.