This simple board game provides an excellent way to give students a bit of free speaking practice. You can choose your own topics either based on the topics you've covered in lessons or topics that you think will be of interest to your students.

Download game board:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/talking_topics.pdf

• Print off a copy of the board and fill in the squares with topics your students could talk about for one minute. Choose topics they’ve covered in classes with you or general ones such as friends, family, music, TV, hobbies, last weekend, next weekend, holidays, English classes (!), food, films etc. etc. You could also add in a few ‘go back three spaces’ or ‘miss a go’ squares.
• Making the game could be a class activity if you ask your students to prepare the boards for each other in groups then they can swap boards and you’ll have a whole class set to use.
• If talking for a minute is too difficult for your students, they can write questions in the squares to ask the person to their right/left as they move around the board.
• If you don’t have dice to use, use a coin and make heads mean they move on one space and tails they move on two. This will obviously take longer than with a dice.
• If your students enjoy playing board games they could make their own in small groups.

BY JO BUDDEN

This activity is taken from:                                  http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/language-assistant/games/talking-topics