Top 5 Small talk ESL activities | Fun ESL Conversation Ideas
Many of our students say they want to practice their conversation skills. You can use these 5 Small talk ESL activities to help them do just that and to work on speaking more fluently at the same time.
Continue watching this video to find the best Small Talk activities for your students.
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Transcript
Here are my top five ESL Small Talk activities. Number one is three in a row. I put students into pairs and then each pair matches up with another pair, so each group would have four students, two teams of two. And then I would have a grid, a 5x5 grid and I would write a bunch of topics on the paper that people would kind of do for small talk. Maybe getting to work, hobbies, weather, sports, weekend plans. And then students would do paper, rock, scissors and the winning team they get to choose the first square. So maybe they would choose hobbies. The other team would have their cell phone and they would do a timer for 1 minute and the team that chose that hobbies square, their challenge is is to talk about hobbies for one minute without stopping. If they're successful, they get to put an X.
The second Small Talk activity is a cocktail party. I would get students to shout out some topics that people might talk about at a party. Maybe they would talk about their kids, they would talk about their weekends, maybe their upcoming holidays. And then I would also get students to shout out some things that you shouldn't talk about, so for example, asking someone how old they are, talking about politics, religion. And then I get students to kind of give me some examples of ways they would start a conversation. They would shout out some examples, for example, maybe, do you have any weekend plans or do you have any holidays coming up, whatever so that's also fresh in students mind.
The students will stand up and then they can just mingle around the classroom, having little small talk conversations with everybody and I would also tell students that the goal is not to be stuck talking to someone for the entire 10 minutes or 15 minutes, however long we do this activity but the goal is to mingle and kind of talk to everybody. I'd also talk about ways to politely end a conversation. I would say I encourage students to maybe talk to someone for maybe 2 minutes or 3 minutes and then move on and talk to someone else.
The third activity is the expert. I get students on a piece of paper, to write down three things that they are very knowledgeable in. Maybe it's cooking Korean food, playing softball, and pro tennis, something like that. Watching pro tennis. After that, I put students into pairs and they would have their little paper. And then I get those two students to have a conversation for four or five minutes about the topics on their piece of paper. Once they're done that, I get them to switch and then they can talk to someone else.
The fourth Small Talk activity is telling a story. I have a story prompt, maybe your most embarrassing moment or a funny story from when you were in middle school, something from when you were growing up, maybe your favorite holiday, whatever that is. Then I give students a little bit of time to prepare their story. I don't want them to write sentence by sentence, but they can write a few little notes about the points that they're going to cover. I put students into groups of four and they would tell their story to the group and so the first person is telling their story, everyone, the other three people are listening and then at the end, those other three people have to ask a follow-up question.
And the fifth small Tech activity is to give students some conversation starters. If you tell students, do small talk with your partner for 5 minutes, I mean you're probably going to have a lot of silence in your class because there just isn't really enough information or structure to that class.
Timestamp for ESL small talk activities:
0:00 Intro
0:08 3 In a Row
1:05 Cocktail party
2:42 The expert
3:30 Telling a story
4:22 Conversation starters
5:04 Outro