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Snakes and Ladders Game as a Speaking Activity

    The Conversational Snakes and Ladders game is a fun classroom activity for English learners and provides questions for students on three levels – from elementary to advanced.

    How to play

    The conversational snakes and ladder game by Twinkle is like the traditional game but is linked to sets of questions depending on the level of competence the students have in English.

    Students throw a dice to determine how many spaces they may move forward or up the ladders. Landing on a space with a snake takes them back, but most of the spaces have question marks. Whenever a student lands on a question mark, they are supposed to answer a question or talk about something for 10 to 30 seconds.

    The three levels

    As said, there are different levels of questions in this game. So, if you’ve got students that are beginners or intermediate, there are questions for them and there are also questions for advanced learners.

    Here is a dice that you can use if you do not have your own. Print it and cut it out to make nice big dice. I prefer using a big soft, inexpensive dice that makes it easy for students to follow and see on what random number it has landed. You can also use a dice app on your smartphone.

    Then you can see here are some questions. The purple questionnaire is for beginners, the green for intermediate, and the orange for advanced learners of English. It provides lots of questions that you can print and give to students or copy and send if you are doing hybrid or online ESL teaching. Challenge students to answer the questions on the higher level too.

    Here are some of the intermediate questions: “What makes you happy?” “How do people in your country stay healthy?” “Describe a pet or friend’s pet?”

    Here are some of the advanced-level questions: “What animal best represents your personality?” “What does a 21st-century community look like?”

    So, students have to try to advance all the way to the end of this snakes and ladders game. It is super useful and you can use it for most of the class because it’s got so many questions and it can improve students’ speaking ability.

    If you would like this game, just click on the link down below in the description. It will take you to the Twinkle website where you log in and download this game for free.

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