ESL activities for beginners: what adult A1 learners can actually do

An adult beginner has a job, opinions and often a deadline, and can say almost none of it in English yet. Most lists of ESL activities for beginners are written for classrooms of children: ball toss, Simon Says, a song about colours. They don't carry over to a 45-minute online lesson with one adult who needs to fill in a form at the town hall next month.

A better starting point is the level itself. The CEFR describes what an A1 learner can do in plain language, and each clause of that description reads like an activity brief.

What can an A1 learner actually do?

The Council of Europe's global scale describes A1 like this:

"Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things he/she has. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help."

That is the A1 row of the CEFR global scale. Read its last sentence again. Help is written into the definition of the level. An A1 learner succeeds with support, so a beginner activity has to build that support in, and then take it away one piece at a time.

The grammar is just as bounded. The British Council and EAQUALS Core Inventory for General English lists the A1 grammar as items like to be, the present simple, there is/are, can/can't, possessive adjectives and prepositions of place. An activity that needs the past tense or a conditional to complete is not a beginner activity, whatever its label says.

Which activity fits each A1 can-do?

Each clause of the A1 descriptor maps to an activity with the help built in:

A1 can-do (CEFR)	What the learner practises	Activity	The help built in
Familiar everyday expressions	Hello, please, thank you, "Can you repeat that, please?"	Flashcards (you say each one aloud), then Match Pairs (phrase to situation)	They see and hear the phrase before they ever have to produce it
Introduce yourself and others	My name is, I'm from, I work in, This is my sister	Complete the Sentence with a word bank	The sentence frame is given; they choose one missing piece
Ask and answer about personal details	Where do you live? Do you have children?	Quiz (pick the answer that fits the question), then Unjumble (rebuild the question)	Options first, then word order with every word on screen
People they know, things they have	Family words, numbers, have/has	Labelled Diagram (a family tree, a flat), Match Pairs	The picture carries the meaning
Concrete needs	Buying a ticket, asking the way, spelling a name on a form	Roleplay with a short model dialogue, then without it	The script is there to lean on, and comes away next lesson

Notice what is not on the list: debates, opinion questions, anything that needs a story told in the past. Those are A2 and B1 jobs. A beginner who is asked for them goes quiet, and the silence often gets read as shyness when it is a level mismatch.

How do you climb from recognition to production?

Keep the content still while the task gets harder, one rung per activity; that is our first recommendation for any beginner. Take one set of ten question-and-answer pairs about personal details, here written for a hypothetical learner called Ana. Six of the ten:

• What's your name? / My name is Ana.
• Where are you from? / I'm from Brazil.
• Where do you live? / I live in Porto.
• What do you do? / I'm a nurse.
• Do you have children? / Yes, I have two.
• How do you spell that? / A-N-A.

Then climb, one rung per activity:

Rung	Activity	What the learner does	Help removed
1	Flashcards	Sees the question, flips to the model answer, hears you say both	None yet. Nothing can go wrong
2	Match Pairs	Joins each question to a sensible answer	The answer is no longer shown next to its question
3	Quiz	Picks the right answer from three, one of which answers a different question	They now have to understand the question, not spot a familiar word
4	Complete the Sentence	"I ___ in Porto." First with a word bank, then without	The options
5	Type the Answer, then Speaking Practice	Answers about themselves, in writing and then aloud	Everything. This is the A1 can-do, done alone

If a learner stalls, step down one rung, not back to the start. Rungs 1 to 3 are recognition; rungs 4 and 5 are production, and the gap between them is where beginner lessons often stop. Which format trains which skill has the longer version of that distinction.

Here is the bottom rung, the first exposure where the learner cannot get anything wrong:

The first rung: Flashcards

Flip each card and give the past simple of the verb.

Card 1 of 8

TermgowentTap to flipNext card

That set is generic. The version that works is built from your learner's real answers: their own city and job, their children's names. In Lingoken you type those ten lines once, then switch the same set from Flashcards to Match Pairs to Quiz without retyping anything, and send each rung as a link.

If you'd rather start from ready-made sets, our free A1 English games page collects fifteen activities around the same can-dos: articles, food, daily routines and the present simple.

Why does the help have to come off?

The help has to come off because the A1 can-do is something the learner ends up doing alone, so a lesson plan should say when each piece goes. There is a name for the space where that happens.

A look from pedagogy

Lev Vygotsky called it the zone of proximal development: "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers." He was writing about children, but the CEFR's A1 learner, who can interact "provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help," is a learner working inside that zone. Your word bank, your slow speech and your model answer are the support, and the lesson plan should say when each one comes off.

Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society (1978), chapter 6.

The line from Mind in Society a tutor can use comes a page after that definition: what a learner "can do with assistance today she will be able to do by herself tomorrow."

Teaching research calls this support scaffolding. Barak Rosenshine's summary of what effective teachers do lists "Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks" as one of ten principles, next to "Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step." Rosenshine, Principles of Instruction (2012)

How much should a beginner get right?

About 80 percent. Rosenshine reports that "the optimal success rate for fostering student achievement appears to be about 80 percent," high enough that students are learning the material, low enough that they are still being challenged. Rosenshine (2012)

For a beginner, read that as a dial on the ladder:

What you see	What it means	What to do
Every answer right, fast	The rung is too low	Remove one piece of help next time
Most answers right, a few slips	About where you want to be	Stay on this rung, rerun it next lesson
Many misses, long pauses	The rung is too high	Step down one rung and rebuild

Per-question results make that dial usable. When a learner plays a set as homework, the results come back to you question by question, so you can see that they know "Where do you live?" cold and still miss "What do you do?" before the next lesson starts.

What changes in a one-to-one online lesson?

Most beginner activity lists assume a room full of students. On a video call with one adult, a few adjustments do most of the work:

• "Find someone who" becomes "find out about me." There is no class to mingle with, so the learner interviews you, using the same questions from the ladder. Then you swap.
• Let them hold the controls. Send the activity as a link they open on their own phone or laptop instead of watching you click through a shared screen. No student account is needed, so this takes seconds.
• Keep each activity short. Five minutes per rung is plenty at A1. In practice, switching format feels like a rest even when the content stays the same.
• Reuse the set as homework. The same ten items, sent as a Quiz after the lesson, tell you what stuck before you plan the next one.

What does a first lesson with an adult A1 learner look like?

A 45-minute first lesson can run one set of ten items through six activities:

Minutes	Activity	Content
0 to 5	Greetings, modelled by you	Hello, my name is, nice to meet you
5 to 15	Flashcards, then Match Pairs	The ten personal-details pairs
15 to 25	Quiz, then Complete the Sentence with a word bank	Same ten pairs
25 to 35	Speaking: you interview the learner, then swap	Same questions, real answers
35 to 42	Type the Answer, no word bank	Five of the ten, about themselves
42 to 45	Send the set as a homework link	Same set as a Quiz

By the end the learner has done exactly what the A1 descriptor says: introduced themselves and asked and answered questions about personal details, with less help at minute 40 than at minute 5. Keep the themes adult and tied to why they are learning; why adult classes reject childish games is a separate post.

Sources & further reading

• Global scale, Table 1 (CEFR 3.3): Common Reference Levels. Council of Europe. The A1 descriptor this post is built on.
• British Council and EAQUALS Core Inventory for General English. The grammar and functions typically taught at each CEFR level, A1 to C1.
• Mind in Society. L. S. Vygotsky, Harvard University Press. Chapter 6 introduces the zone of proximal development.
• Principles of Instruction (Rosenshine, 2012). American Educator. Ten research-based principles, including small steps, scaffolds and the 80 percent success rate.