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A very good and engaging tool to use in the classroom and have a follow up discussion. Everybody loves spekaing about their wishes, this way they will watch a video, have some vocabulary on the topic and then express their wishes. I think this way the students will be very engaged in the discussion and improve both their listening and speaking skills. This will best work with adults or young adults, intermediate level. I haven't used it yet in my classes, but I will for sure:)

This cartoon can be used to practice the four skills: reading, writing, speaking, listening. Suggestion on how to use: Before students listen/read the story, they are pre-taught some new vocabulary used in the story. Then students can play the story in pictures while they're listening to it. They can click on the button "READ" to turn off and on the text. It's better if the first time, they listen to the story with the text on (reading while listening). Then, they will listen to the story with the text off and see if they can still understand. (listening) When they feel confident, they can watch the story again with the text off and try to tell the story along with the pictures, without reading (speaking). You can also ask them to write this tale down as a composition (about 250 words or more if you want to). Vocabulary can also be boosted through story. Students can also come up with their own ideas by discussing where they would go if they had a magic carpet. I tried this with my young advance elementary students and it was pretty successful. we had also a very engaging discussion in which students said they would have gone if they have had a magic carpet. They also very much liked the cartoon itself.

This is a wonderful activity for developing students' listening, reading (skimming and scanning), speaking skills, as well as increasing vocabulary. it contains variety of activities which are based on the listening. Moreover, all the activities can be done both online and on paper (all materials are printable including the transcript of the audio). It contains a pre-watching vocabulary activity the story a comprehension activity a language activity about idioms I used this material with my two intermediate students. Though the level was lower I have decided to try. In order to help them I wrote down the words/expression that they might be unknown and discussed them before listening. Then they listened to the audio but still had difficulties to understand completely what the audio was mainly about. In order to solve the misunderstanding I have decided to give the transcripts to read while listening (It helped much to understand). I used the third activity to check whether they could scan and skim the information (they could as I guess reading helped them very much). The last activity was a multiple choice activity where the students should look at the given idioms and choose the best meaning. Suggestion- If your students are not high intermediate/advanced the process will be slowed down. Just use transcript and after listening discuss the text. It will help.

Dear all, here is a link where I found a collection of strange signs. You may enjoy sharing it with your students or colleagues. Actually it is not an activity but it is an excellent raw material for creating a good activity. For example you may ask your students to decide what is wrong in these signs and getting students to correct them. Since the list is very funny and authentic I think it is very motivating for discussing it too so this may become a very good topic for the classroom discussion. Anyway I think you may create an excellent activity for the development of your students' speaking skills.

These materials are from BBC Learning English site. All of them are downloadable and each audio & video material have its pdf file (with transcript and vocabulary). These audios/videos are good for developing students' listening and reading skills, increasing students' vocabulary, and also speaking skills. It depends on the purpose of using this material. For example I used the first one (I haven't used the others yet) "Are men the weaker sex" with my intermediate students. While listening they underlined all the unknown words they had come up with, then we discussed the words together (I explained them in a target language). After, the discussion, I asked them not to look at the transcript and listened to the audio again. At the end of the audio they told me what the audio was about and in this way I could make them speak.

Read about facts and match them to countries. Not as interactive, but could work for lessons where you discuss geography and agriculture. 

This video would best work with grown up kids. this video presents one of the greatest speeches, Franklin D. Roosevelt - Declaration of War. This video will improve the students' listening skills, give information about world war II and the students will not only listen to the speech but also see Franklin D. Roosevelt. This can be used when covering topics such famouse people, famouse speeches, history...afterwards they can have a debriefing discussion.

Please scroll down the webpage to see the activitity Who shall survive? This communicative activity requres students to make decisions, use the language to persuade the others.

We found a number of good activities that we can use in our class, for example, pictionary or bingo, word association, etc.

Students practice asking follow up questions while discussing a topic in their group.

In this interesting writing/speaking activity students write and discuss how people must and mustn't behave in their imaginative perfect world. I think this will work best with pre-intermediate level.

We liked this activity very much, we will definitely use this right away.

In this speaking activity students think about and discuss a city they would like to live in for a year. The activity is based on themes from the British Council OPENCities project.

I really liked the activity as while practising the comparatives it may also induce some discussion about the validity of the facts introduced by students.

I used this video/audio file to teach my 9 years old niece and her 8 years old friend English prepositions of places. The interesting thing was that I didn't tell them that they were going to learn prepositions . I just played the video clip and went away letting them watch and enjoy it. After watching the video clip several times, I noticed that they were learning prepositions by discussing the video clip and translating prepositions into Armenian language. Hence, I found this video clip to be very useful for teaching prepositions to children in an entertaining way.

These exercises are good for developing students' listening, reading, and writing skills. In addition to these skills, it also develops students' vocabulary. While listening and watching the songs or a video poem, the students will have opportunity to write down the missing words in a given space and later on check the answers. I used this type of exercises with my students and to tell the truth they liked them very much. This type of exercises can be used at the end of the lesson or in the middle of it, when teacher notice some boredom during the lesson. They play as a good refresh. After listening the song, the teacher may discuss it with students (as I did) or even translate. There are also some words at the end of each song and students may learn them as well.

This is a listening exercise which aims to assist learners' intonation and stress. For this song, upper intermediate students should listen and fill in the blanks with no help or discussion. They should then check what they have written with classmates. Once the lyrics are completed, students should be encoureged to sing along with the song, in order to practise the stress and intonation. I practised it with my student when having tutoring and it helped greatly.

This is a good reading and speaking task which includes scientific issues in a simplified language. The topic is attractive for teenagers and there are enough discussion issues to use as a reading and speaking exercise in the class situation.

Alice is a bot (robot) with A.I. (artificial intelligence). You can chat with her, and she'll speak back to you. She never gets bored or tired of talking with you. She can answer math questions, tell you where most countries are and what their capitals are,and she even knows a few pretty funny jokes. She at times makes mistakes, but overall performs very well. She can understand you a lot better if you type carefully. Your students can chat with Alice to practice English, but they have to try to type and spell carefully. They need to take their time, and think about good grammar, good vocabulary and making good sentences. They can use their conversation as a practice time to apply what they have learned in English. You can chat with Alice anytime. The first 2500 exchanges each month have more animation and even have speech. I tried chating with her for half an hour and I should confess that I fell in love with her! She can nicely initiate discussions or answer your questions. A great tool to both practice language and also learn new things from her.