ESL Speaking Game: 20 Questions | 20 Questions For TEFL Students of All Ages and Levels

I’m sure you’ve played the game “20 questions” before. It’s basically where someone thinks of a secret noun (person, place or thing) and the other team or person gets to ask up to 20 questions to figure out what it is. 20 questions works well for ESL/EFL learners as well. It’s a fun way to get ESL/EFL students practicing questions and working on some basic vocabulary. Keep watching to learn more about using twenty questions in your English classes. It's a nice time-filler or end-of-the-class activity when you have a few minutes to spare. ------------------- • A Simple ESL Listening and Speaking Activity: Me Too: : https://youtu.be/gMGR2tV2Xe0 • Top Speaking Games/ Activities! ESL by: @Tasnim Salah   https://youtu.be/YYfDFfmAufY ------------------- More details about 20 questions for ESL: https://eslspeaking.org/20-questions-esl-speaking-game/ Want to find more low or No Prep ESL activities? Check out: https://amzn.to/3KbTtgU -------------------- Check out another ESL speaking activity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MMCLcm58-A --------------------- https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie?lang=en #teachingenglishwithjackie #20questions #eslgames Transcript for ESL 20 Questions: 0:00 Intro 0:35 Teaching tips for 20 questions 1:36 Variation for beginners 2:10 Prevent random guessing 3:03 Conclusion Today I'm going to talk about one of my favourite ESL activities called 20 questions. So I'm sure you've played 20 questions before with your friends or family members. It's where someone thinks of a person, place, or thing and then you have 20 questions to ask them in order to figure out what that person, place, or thing is. You can play it with your more advanced students just kind of as-is, where the person can literally think of anything and then the other students will ask questions to that person to figure it out. However, there is kind of a couple of things that I do in my ESL classes in order to just make it go more smoothly. I will usually choose the first thing and then get students to ask me questions but then whoever guesses the thing correctly, or the person, or the place, or thing correctly, can go next and have the secret thing. However, I get them to tell me what it is because you know maybe they don't quite understand the question. Maybe it's some like super, super obscure thing like an armadillo that probably the rest of the students in the class don't even know. So I've had definitely like some angry students before when I haven't done that so this is just the easiest way to combat that so you can kind of like cut things off at the pass for someone choosing some too obscure thing that nobody else knows. Or, if they answer a question incorrectly, I can say oh hold on, actually, the answer to that is yes or the answer is no. Then, another variation of this is to do something like 10 questions so I would use this for more beginners. I choose a category based on whatever I'm teaching, so jobs or animals and I'll choose a job and I'll tell the students it's a job and then they have 10 questions to ask and figure out what the job is, or animals, or whatever else you're doing. If you have 20 questions or 10 questions, a guess also counts as a question. If you don't say this, students will often say if I say it's an animal they'll say, cat, dog, fish, tiger, elephant. Of course, it's just like they're not even asking questions and they're barely speaking English. It's just kind of a total waste of time so if you make an answer count as a question as well to go up to their total, then it prevents the random guessing. They have to ask a yes or no question. Does it have four legs? Yes. Does it live in the water? Yes. Things like that and then they can just go and they'll actually ask better questions than just making random guesses. All right, that's it. It's kind of the ultimate time-filler warm-up activity. It's kind of just one of those things to have in the back of your mind if you get this like last-minute class or you have a few minutes left over at the end of class and nothing's going on. You don't want your students just to have a bunch of downtime to like do whatever they want to do. Just pull up this fun game and students really seem to enjoy it for sure. Tags: ESL Speaking Game,asking questions esl, 20 questions game ideas, 20 questions game, TEFL Students, activities for non english speaking students, learning games, teaching esl, teachers, teaching activities, fun activities, games, english, learning english, esl games, english teacher, english, learning language, Classroom games, ESL adults, ESL kids, TEFL, TEFL activities, TEFL classroom, 20 Questions, Question Games