Daily Schedule ESL Speaking Activity

Skills: Speaking/listening/writing
Time: 10-20 minutes
Level: Beginner to Low-intermediate
Materials Required: Nothing

Activity Description for Daily Routine:

It seems that in most beginner ESL speaking or 4-skills textbooks there is a unit on daily schedules, such as, “What time do you get up?” or, “What do you do in the afternoon?”

A fun activity that you can do is to have students interview their partner. You can pre-select questions for lower level classes or let the students choose their own questions for higher levels. Make sure you specify a minimum number of questions if you let the students choose their own.

Have the students jot down a few notes as they go. Then, they have to close their notebooks, and in a group of four, they have to explain their partner’s daily schedule to the other pair in their group.

If the students are high enough level, you can give a quick reminder about reported speech. If not, let students use any English that they can to explain their partner’s daily schedule.

The other group can ask a follow-up question or two to the person whose schedule was talked about. I usually require each person listening to ask 1 question. This helps to encourage active listening and also gives students a chance to practice asking and answering some follow-up questions.

You can put some example questions on the board to help your beginner students with this. I usually highlight the 5 W’s and H (who, what, when, why, where, how).

Daily Routine of an ESL Teacher in Korea

Teaching Tips for Daily Schedule:

This is an excellent activity to turn a boring topic into something that isn’t so terrible. Being able to talk about daily schedules is quite an important thing for our learners to be able to do, so ignore the temptation to just skip it when you come to it in your book.

Tip #1:

I usually give students a set amount of time to interview their partner such as 3 minutes x 2 = 6 minutes. So each person has to ask questions for three entire minutes and then answer questions for the same amount of time.

I emphasize that if the three minutes is not up, they can think of another 1-2 questions to ask. After the first three minutes, I’ll say, “Stop, change” so that students don’t have to keep track of the time themselves (they probably won’t).

Tip #2:

While reported speech is kind of a higher level concept, you can introduce it briefly in this activity and provide some concrete examples for students to follow. This happens when two teams join together and are reporting what they learned about their partner to the other pair. For example, “Jen said that she _____,” or “Tim told me that he _____.”

Tip #3

For beginner level students, you will need to be very explicit about the kinds of questions and answers they could use and make sure they access to examples of them, either in the textbook or on the whiteboard.

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Procedure for Daily Schedule:

1. Assign the task to the students, specifying if they must ask questions that you’ve prepared for them, or if they make their own and how many question.

2. Put students in pairs and they can interview their partner about their daily schedule, taking brief notes.

3. Students switch interviewer/interviewee roles.

4. Put each pair with another pair.

5. Student A introduces student B to the other pair. The other pair has a chance to ask some follow-up questions.

6. Continue until all four student’s daily schedules have been introduced.

7. The teacher can follow-up with the class (optional). A fun way to do this is to ask each group to share the most interesting or surprising thing. A common answer is a student who gets up really, really early because they live so far away from the school.

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Daily Schedule ESL Speaking Activity: Have your Say!

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