Top 5 ESL Review Games and Activities | Fun English Review Games for Children and Adults

If you’re looking to make sure your students understood what you taught them in a previous lesson, consider using an ESL review activity or game! I’ve compiled my top 5 review activities and games for you to use in your classroom. Review is key in any language class. Students won’t remember new vocabulary or grammatical structures until they see them multiple times! That’s why I love to review at the end of the class, at the beginning of the next class, at the month’s end and then before an exam. Check out the video for my favourite TEFL review ideas. ---------------------- Try out this very fun ESL review game: --------------------- Want to find out more about ESL review ideas? Check out: 39 ESL Review Games & Activities: #review #teachingenglishwithjackie #reviews #eslteacher #englishteacher -------------------- Even more Ideas for the TEFL Classroom: -------------------- Check out more review games from @PocketfulofPrimary -------------------- Timestamp 0:00 Intro 0:08 Board games 0:49 Surveys 1:34 Flashcard sentences 2:03 Dictogloss 2:50 Roleplays 3:39 Conclusion Transcript for ESL review activities: Hi everybody, it’s Jackie from . Today I’m going to talk about my favourite ESL review games. I love using board games ( in my classes. The secret is that it’s super easy to make your own to review just about anything. Quite literally almost any grammar point or vocabulary point once you have a little template which I use. You can check it out on my website. The link is below. You can make your own board game in I want to say like 15 minutes. And once you make the simple past board game you’ll have it forever. You can just search in Google Drive or whatever. Another good one is should/shouldn’t and can/ can’t, something like that. So those are all great things to do for board games. The next review game is a survey. So this is where students have a set of questions. For example, maybe the pp (present perfect), have you ever gone skydiving? And then there is a follow-up question that they would do in the simple past. So if you’re talking about pp and simple past, this is the obvious thing to do. So a student would have his piece of paper in his hand and then a pencil as well and he would talk and ask a classmate, have you ever gone skydiving? His classmate, yes I have. Then the student would have to ask a follow-up question. When did you go? I went two years ago. All right, the next one is flashcard sentences ( This is for kind of absolute beginners as a nice way to review vocabulary or basic grammar as well. If you have a flash card, there’s maybe a cat flash card, just show the flash card and absolute beginners could actually just say a cat or it’s a cat or something like that. For more advanced students, you could get them to ask questions. Maybe one student picks up the card, see a cat, they ask a question. do you have a cat? Yes, I do. Or, no I don’t. The next one is dictogloss ( This is for slightly more advanced students. It’s a listening-focused activity so write up a dialogue, not a dialogue. Well, I don’t know, it’s not a dialogue. It’s just a monologue I guess that has a bunch of the target grammar or vocabulary in it. And then put students into groups of two. They each have a pen and paper. Then read out the dialogue at a faster than normal pace, like quite a quick pace. Students have to take notes and then talk with their partners and attempt to recreate what they’ve heard. They can do this either by writing or speaking. It’s really up to you. Then read it out again. Students kind of add more to what they have and then they can compare their version with the teacher’s version in the end. The last review game that I like is role-plays. So if you’re talking about a bunch of vocabulary, there are some vocabulary that lends themselves super well to role-plays. Things like buying, shopping at the store. For example, you’re talking about money, you’re talking about maybe clothes, whatever. Have students make up a little role play of going to the store and talking about buying something, talking about money, etc. Another one is maybe someone sees their friend and they’re not feeling well so they’re asking questions about that. Or, maybe some functional language like someone has to cancel an appointment with a friend. You can maybe do a little phone call role play to do that. So that works for just about anything quite honestly for beginners. Those are my favourite ESL review games to try out with your students!