I’ve launched my new store selling teaching materials on Teachers Pay Teachers and, over the next few days, I’m going to share some of the products I’ve listed and some ideas on how to use them. We start with a resource I designed teaching TEFL in Thailand, and which was always super-fun and very popular with students.
200 Conversation Cards & 64 Conversation Cards
These conversation prompt cards are great for milling activities, sparking conversations, and developing speaking confidence. They’re designed to provide scaffolding for weaker students, and they’re awesome for learning more about each other.
Features:
- 8 color-coded categories.
- Differentiation – two difficulty levels for each card.
- Teacher guide with 6 suggested activities.
- Clear, colorful design.
- Different cards in each pack.
- U.S. and U.K. spellings.
How to use them:
I usually used the cards for warmer activities, like this:
- Give everyone a couple of cards.
- Show the two difficulty levels.
- Elicit a few questions from their cards.
- Get everyone to stand up and clear the tables and chairs to the sides.
- Students mill about and take turns speaking to different students:
- Students say ‘Hi’.
- Student A – Ask a question.
- Student B – Answer the question.
- Student B – Ask a question.
- Student A – Answer the question.
- Students swap the cards they used.
- Students say ‘Bye’.
- Students find a new partner and repeat.
As the teacher, it’s fun to take part too, but I recommend keeping an eye on the students and making sure they are asking questions, swapping cards, and moving to new partners.
Why I love this activity:
- It involves all the students simultaneously. There’s only so much one-on-one time you can give students, and we often overlook using other students as a learning resource. It’s also a great opportunity for students to practice speaking independently, away from the eyes of the teacher, which is great for risk-taking and negotiating language difficulties.
- Students are pushed out of their comfort zones. They’re forced to speak to other students they might not have spoken with before. The cards also support them to go beyond topics they’ve memorized questions and answers for, and try out new dialogs.
- It supports a lot of language production. I’m always surprised at how long this activity can last. I’ve run it for about 20 minutes with students constantly chatting and having fun.
- We all learn new things about each other and can share this after the main activity.
Other uses:
Here are a few other activities you can run:
- Composing and peer-reviewing suitable answers to cards.
- Introducing and composing and peer-reviewing follow-up questions to build realistic dialogs.
- Hotseat activities.
- Station activities using different categories of cards.
- Asking questions as students enter the class.
- Line games with the teacher asking the questions from the cards.
Ok, that’s enough sales pitch for today! If you have any other great activities you think you could use for these cards, or ideas about how I could improve them, drop me an email or comment below…. and here are the links again:
… and if you want to give them a try for free, check out this free product sample containing 20 cards:
AB Teaching Materials 