If you are like me, you are always looking for conversation activities to get your class talking. Well, here is one that is sure to go down well with the students. It can be used as a warmer, as a much-needed break in the middle of class, as a lead-in to a particular topic or as an activity to practise a language point already covered. The best thing about it is that there is almost no preparation time required. Just follow these simple steps:

Step
Give out three slips of paper to each student in your class (you can usually get about 14 slips from one A4 sheet).

Step
Ask them to write a sentence on each slip of paper, which relates to their lives. (Asking them to personalise the sentences will make the activity both more fun and more meaningful.) It could be topical, eg Write three sentences about your holidays. Alternatively, you could focus on a certain language point, eg Write three sentences about your life or your family using the present perfect.

On the topic of holidays, a student might write:

Collect the slips and explain to the students that you are going to redistribute them so that they each have three slips from other students. The primary aim of the activity is to create a situation to prompt a natural conversation. The secondary aim is for the students to find the author of each sentence and to return the slip. They do this by mingling and asking questions (without showing their slips to the other students).

✱ With lower-level students, it often helps to have the students write the questions they will need to ask underneath the statements first. This raises their confidence and helps to improve fluency.

✱ To make the exercise more challenging, you can instruct the students not to ask direct questions, thereby encouraging a more natural conversation. For example, instead of one student asking ‘Have you been to England and the United States on holiday?’ and the other student replying ‘Yes’, the conversation might go something like this:

Once the students have each got their original slips back, or when the conversations seem to be dying down, reseat the class and collect up all the slips. I then usually take all the slips home that night and select and type up ten sentences that are written incorrectly to be used in the following lesson for error correction. This way the students are focusing on problem areas that are present in their language. This is far better that writing your own sentences or taking random exercises from a grammar book, which usually bear little relation to the students’ lives.

Finally, you can finish the session off by asking the students to report back on what they learnt about each other from their conversations. The best way to do this is to select a few slips at random and read them out one at a time to find out which student wrote each one. I then ask that student which student returned it to them and have them both report back on their conversation. This feedback section of the activity is important because it usually catches out the students who didn’t have a good conversation and encourages them to talk more extensively the next time you do this exercise.

I find that after a while the conversations get longer and longer, and eventually the slips become a relatively unimportant part of the activity as the students become more comfortable with chatting in English.

I hope you enjoy this activity, as it is one of the few conversation activities that I can honestly say never fails. I’ve shared it with many teachers and they have all said that it worked well. It is also a great way to throw a lesson together if you are short of preparation time.