Here you can find a range of short activities to use in your secondary classroom with students at beginner level. All of our activities are designed around themes engaging and relevant to secondary learners and can be used to complement your school curriculum, giving students an opportunity to develop their English language and skills in motivating and enjoyable ways. Written by young learner experts from around the world, our activities are easy to use and aim to give your students the skills and confidence they need to enjoy learning English.

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Recycling vocabulary

Did you know that you have to see a new word at least five times before you can usually use it and include it in your 'active' vocabulary?

Water

This activity is about the uses of water. It looks at how some of us do things with water every day, while some people in some parts of the world are not able to do them.

Where were you ...?

This a semi-controlled writing activity which focuses on using the past continuous verb form to talk about events in the past. Learners write about what they were doing when they heard about an important event, either personal or public.

Phonemic symbols

Support your pronunciation activities with our 44 A4 size downloadable pronunciation posters.

Vocabulary recycling and revision of phonemic symbols

If you have an interactive whiteboard, or a computer with a data projector, the phonemic chart can be used in class to recycle and reinforce recently learned vocabulary, at the same time as revising the phonemic symbols.

Voiced and unvoiced consonants

Certain pairs of consonants can be problematic for some learners. This discovery activity can be used to help learners notice the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants.

Using video 2

Video is a great resource to use in class and there are an endless number of ways to exploit it to create motivating, memorable classes with a high level of language production.

Writing correction code

This is a common tool to optimise learning opportunities from mistakes learners make in written work and to encourage the editing stages of process writing.

Research and insight

Browse fascinating case studies, research papers, publications and books by researchers and ELT experts from around the world.

See our publications, research and insight