Free ESL Speaking Ideas: Mystery, Time Travel, and Tools

As an ESL teacher, you're always trying to solve the mystery of what will get your students speaking. Here are some speaking activity ideas to encourage fluency and discussion on the topic of mysteries, time travel, and tools. These speaking activities are best suited for intermediate level or above speakers.

Discussion Questions

What was this town or city like before people started to live here?
What things do you think are mysterious?
What mysteries would like to solve?
What would you do if you could look back in time?
Would you rather look forward in time or back in time?
How are tools different for us now than in the past?
What are the most essential tools for daily life?
What is a tool that does not exist that would be helpful in your daily life?

Role Play Ideas:

Student A will be a time traveler from an early civilization. Student B will be a modern day person. Student A should ask questions about some things located in the classroom such as a TV, computer, and mobile phone. Student B should describe how and why we use each of those items to Student A. This is a great exercise for helping students practice finding other ways to describe common objects.

Debate:

Divide the students into groups. Half of the groups should discuss why time travel would be a good thing. Half of the groups should discuss why time travel would be a bad thing. After the groups have had a chance to write up their arguments, groups should be paired together and come to a conclusion. If you have an even more advanced class, they can discuss how time travel should be regulated if it¡¯s allowed. Then, they can work together to write up some laws about time travel. Some sample stem sentences to get the conversation started :
Time travel is good idea because _______ but we must ________
Time travel is a bad idea because _______ and we must _______.
There should be limits on time travel such as __________
If we allow time travel to happen, we should ________
One way to make time travel safer is to _______
Time travel can benefit us by ______

Interview:

For this activity, students should work in pairs. Student A has just invented a new tool that will change civilization forever. Student B is a reporter for a newspaper. Student B should try to find out as much information as possible about the new tool. Also, you can set up a panel interview where some students are inventors and some are journalists. The journalists should interview the inventors about their own tools and compare them with the others inventors¡¯ tools. Then, the journalists can decide which tool is the most useful. Some sample questions:
Why did you invent this tool?
How is this tool going to help people live their lives better?
How is this tool different than other tools?
Why is your tool better than the other products presented today?
Who needs this tool the most?