Here you can find a range of short activities to use in your adult classroom with students at intermediate level. All of our activities are designed around engaging themes and relevant to adult learners of English. Written by 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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Hotel Booking

This activity provides short listening practice based around a phone call to a hotel to enquire about reservations.  

Pairwork: tai chi classes

This is a simple pairwork activity that can be used with low level groups to provide practice in the present simple question form – What does he/she do on…?, days of the week, times and leisure activities. The lesson is designed for adults but could also be used with older teenagers.

My Wikipedia

This is an activity 'about' the internet, but it doesn't start online. In fact it has to start offline: the idea is that students try and predict the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for their town, region or country.

Migrant stories

This activity is based around a website that tells the true stories of some people who migrated to Australia many years ago.

Inside lives

This activity practices students’ listening and speaking skills. They first listen to a description of two images and then they analyse the language used and try to use it to describe some different pictures. The activity takes a similar format to that used in many speaking exams. The images used are those of Viennese migrants, all of whom run specialist businesses. The activity is based on themes and images from the OPENCities project.

Research and insight

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

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