7 Amazing ESL Activities For Teaching English Abroad Adults
Dealing with older ESL learners is a challenging job as each learner will have a separate state of mind. Among the adult ESL learners, you will have to deal with several situations like some of them either won’t want to make a fool of themselves in front of others, or in their view waste class time. Teaching adults English is tricky work to perform and by being sensitive to that, it’s very tempting to just play it safe in ESL activities.
The trick understands how to employ them. ESL activities for adults need to be carefully pre-arranged, associated with existing class work and have a clear language goal in attention. To help you do just that in a better way, we’ve formed this list of the best ESL games for adults.
Following are a few ideas for you to try ---
1. ESL Surveys
ESL surveys are interesting learning activities that move the focus from the teacher to the apprentices. Here, learners focus on at cultivating all the four skills of reading, listening, speaking and writing. It is a game that reproduces what occurs in the real world where apprentices do not have essence on a single activity at any given time.
Learners are required to read precise questions and these questions are directed to students. The students answer the questions and students take notes concerning the responses. This activity also encourages communication among students as they can go around the class and talk to colleagues.
2. Hot Seat
Split the class into two teams, learners should sit facing the whiteboard. Now keep two empty chairs or hot seats that are put at the front facing the teams. A learner from each team sits on the hot seat while facing the team associates, and with the back on the board. After that, a vocabulary word is written on the board and each student on the hot seat tries to guess the word in English. This is a fun ESL activity that supports learners to brush up their vocabulary.
3. Slow Listening
English course books generally have listening segments that can be played in class or at home. However, this could be sometimes beneficial to precisely adapt the listening pace of the recordings to the apprentices’ level and requirements. Sometimes, it happens, there may be discussions, instructions, stories, and so on at a very fast pace that they may not be able to hold.
If you see your older students do not comprehend such spoken language after 3-4 times, they listen to it, they could get irritated. Thus, as to stop listening to understand the message as speaking slowly also means speaking evidently.
4. Pictionary
Divide the class into two teams; one apprentice from every team draws on the whiteboard. Now, teams will make a guess what their classmate is sketching. The time given need to be at least 3 minutes depends on you. Each correct word or guess earns each team points, and the team that earns 10 points or more is the one that wins, decided by you. Learners should be stimulated to raise their hands for a chance to answer. This fun game boosts your ESL lessons and helps your learners to explore more vocabulary.
5. Dictionary Game
You may use this fun activity an advanced English development as it is for learners who know how to write and make use of a dictionary. The educator or a student can pick a word that is tough to understand from the dictionary, no one should find out the meaning of the word. After the word is nominated, each student should write the meaning of the word on a piece of paper, but the person who selected the word should write the real description.
All the documents should then be collected, and all the descriptions should be read out loud to the class so that apprentices can vote on the definition they think is the right one. Apprentices earn points for knowing the correct definition, or for having their definition voted as the correct one.
6. Role Plays
Role plays act as a type of bridge between learning very basic grammar and vocabulary and then free-talking. Role plays frequently work best with high-beginner apprentices who are capable of basic conversations if given a bit of thinking time earlier. You could give your students the complete conversation, but leave some blanks for them to fill in, try to target adjectives to be filled. Then they have to continue it with their own words. Try to formulate a conversation starter based on what you are teaching. Have students complete the conversation in pairs.
7. Personal Questions and Answers
Except your students who are cautious, nearly all of them enjoy talking about themselves and their families. Generally, they are proud of their lives, their retirement, their prior jobs and achievements, etc. This activity can be practiced in pairs, and the learners ask each other for personal details and information. By doing so, they are exposed to language with liking and effortlessness as they have the prospect to show their goals and their dearest ones too.
Concluding Thoughts
Nevertheless, while selecting the ESL activities, it is always up to the ESL teacher to comprehend the apprentices’ level, preferences, and requirements. All of these crucial aspects can be learned from the EFL course online programmes. We hope you’ve found this list of ESL activities for adults useful and will sue in your class…Happy Teaching!
