Here you can find a range of short activities to use in your adult classroom with students at pre-intermediate level. All of our activities are designed around engaging themes engaging 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.

Find activities

Technology

A short series of activities designed to provide students with essential vocabulary and listening practice to help them communicate in English about technology.

Booking a train ticket

This activity provides short listening practice based around a dialogue at a train station ticket office.

Airport check-in

A short series of activities designed to provide students with essential vocabulary and listening practice to help them communicate in English at an airport.

Playing with lexical cards

Very often students know the meaning of a word but don’t know how to use it correctly. This is often because they don’t know what words go with what other words, i.e. collocations.

Three of a kind?

Use this activity to practice the use of comparatives and superlatives and to introduce more complex ways of comparison.

Goodbye game

This activity is great for last lessons of a course, but could be used in other contexts too. It is influenced by an idea from Headway Pre-Intermediate.

Inventions

This is a fun speaking activity in the form of a game. It can be used with most levels and most age groups. Students practise presenting their opinions and reaching agreement. There is an initial group work activity and extension speaking and writing activities.

Doodles: Psychoanalysis

This is a simple speaking activity that can provide practice for describing personalities. The lesson is designed for adults but could also be used with older teenagers.

Elementary podcasts

This is a simple listening activity that can be used with adults and secondary groups, and is based on LearnEnglish Elementary Podcasts.

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