Irregular Verbs – Controlled Past Simple Speaking Activity

Speaking activities are the best thing in teaching and learning a foreign language. However, students sometimes run out of ideas about what they should say or the language they use is far from the one we try to teach them. To solve the problem, I designed the CARD SPEAKING activity.

In this activity, students use controlled language and they have enough to speak about for 10 minutes.

How Does it Work?

First, we need to take control of the language. To achieve this, I use the vanishing drill method. I display a short dialogue, I read the sentences and students repeat them. Then they read the dialogue and I check their pronunciation. Once, I am sure, they get the pronunciation right, I display the second slide.

In the second slide, some of the words are missing. All the students read the dialogue aloud and they have to supply the missing words too. At the moment I feel that all the students can read the text fluently and they say the missing words too, I show them the third slide. Even more words are missing. Students again read the dialogue aloud and they supply the missing words.

We go on like this, till they know the dialogue by heart.

Irregular Verbs – vanishing dialogue

In the following presentation, you can see an example dialogue to practise the past tense of irregular verbs. Here, two friends are speaking about what they did yesterday.

Speaking Cards

When your students know the dialogue by heart, introduce the speaking cards.

Print the following document and cut it along the lines. You will need one set of cards for two students. One page contains two sets of cards.

Students put the cards face down on their desks. One picks a card and she doesn´t show it to their partner. The one who doesn´t have the card starts the dialogue with the sentence: “What did you do yesterday?”

The student with the card uses the activities which are written on it and says them in the past simple tense. The first student carefully listens, because then she has to say that she didn´t do any of these and she has to name the activities.

Thus my students practise the past simple tense.

I have more SPEAKING CARDS sets, which I will share in my next post.