ESL Vocabulary Bingo Speaking Activity

Using textbooks for your classes is great, it means you don’t have to plan your own curriculum, and it gives students some kind of structure to study from. I love the way that most textbooks present grammar explanations and practice. But I have real trouble getting them to revise their vocabulary. You spend an hour talking about and practising those nice phrasal verbs and completing gap fill exercises, only for the students to never use them again in class or in the speaking exercises. Which is frustrating, because topical vocabulary is so important to include in their writing and speaking!

Here’s a game I play with my students, to try and get them to use the vocab from the textbook.

Step One – Choose a Unit, Any Unit

Let’s say food, there’s usually a unit or a section of the book that will deal with food. So let’s choose that…