Drilling Games for ESL English

Drilling Games for ESL English

Are you ready to unleash your students’ creativity while enhancing their English language skills? In this blog post, we’re diving into the world of drawing games tailored specifically for ESL English learners. From collaborative doodling sessions to imaginative illustration challenges, these six engaging activities are designed to make language learning fun and interactive. Whether your students are beginners or advanced learners, these drawing games offer a dynamic way to reinforce vocabulary, practice grammar structures, and foster communication skills. Join us as we explore each game and discover how to ignite a passion for learning through the power of art and language.


This ESL game is great for drilling the structure of questions and answers that you have recently covered in class.

  • Age/Level: Any
  • Time:  20 minutes
  • Players: Individual
  • Preparation: None
  • Aim: To repeat and practice questions and answers
Procedure

Start the game by selecting four students. These students will be the hobbits and will be asking the questions. Get the four hobbits to stand in a line in front of the board.

You are the King. You have to sit on your throne behind the hobbits.

Assign each of the four hobbits a question, e.g. What’s your name? How old are you? Where do you live? What’s your favorite food? The remaining students are orcs. They form a queue near the first hobbit.

The first hobbit asks the first orc in the queue their assigned question, e.g. What’s your name? The orc replies, “My name is…” and they rock, paper, scissors.

If the orc wins, he/she moves on to the second hobbit, who asks the orc the next assigned question, e.g. How old are you?

The orc replies and again, they rock, paper, scissors. If the orc wins, he/she proceeds to the third hobbit and so on. However, if at any time an orc loses at rock, paper, scissors, they must return to the back of the queue and repeat the whole process.

If an orc manages to get past all four hobbits, they have a showdown with the King! You can ask them any question that you’ve covered in class. If the orc answers correctly, you rock, paper, scissors. If the orc wins, you have been dethroned and the orc is now the King.

You must rejoin the game with the other orcs in an attempt to get past all the hobbits to reclaim your throne!

Motivate younger learners to speak English with  this ESL drilling game.

  • Age/Level: Young learners
  • Time: 10 minutes
  • Players: Teams of 6
  • Preparation: Flashcards
  • Aim: To repeat sentences
Procedure

Divide the class into teams of six. Have each team stand in a line.

Hold up a flashcard and make a sentence based on the picture. Each team must repeat your sentence three times and then sit down. The team that sits down first wins.

You can vary the ending by having the students do different actions like turn around or jump before they sit down.

Also, instead of every student speaking at the same time, you can get each student to repeat the sentences one at a time and then sit down.

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