ESL conversation topics for adults, graded by level and by goal

Most lists of ESL conversation topics for adults give you the noun: hobbies, travel, technology, money. The noun is the easy part. What decides whether a topic carries ten minutes of talk or dies in one is the question you build on it, and whether that question fits the learner's level.

"Work" is a good topic at every level. "What do you do?" is an A2 question. "What would you change about your job if you could?" is B1. "Should employers be allowed to track remote workers?" is B2. Same topic, three different lessons. So this post gives each topic three times, one per level, and then adds the two things a long list leaves out: topics tied to why an adult is learning, and topics that need care.

Match the question type to the level

Each CEFR level calls for a different kind of question: simple facts at A2, experiences and reasons at B1, a position with arguments at B2. The Council of Europe's global scale describes what a learner can do at each level, and it maps cleanly onto the kind of question that works. At A2 a learner "can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters". At B1 they can "describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans". At B2 they can "explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options".

Read those as question types:

Level	What the learner can do	The question that fits
A2	Exchange simple facts about familiar things	What, where, when, how often. One fact per answer.
B1	Describe experiences, give brief reasons	Tell me about a time. Why? What happened next?
B2	Argue a view, weigh options	Should. Is it better to. What are the risks of.

In practice, a B1 learner asked an A2 question gives a one-word answer and gets bored. An A2 learner asked a B2 question goes quiet, and tutors often find that kind of silence is what makes a lesson feel hard.

Grade twelve topics to three levels

Each row below is one topic asked three ways. Use the column that matches your learner. If the answer comes easily, move one column right for the follow-up.

Topic	A2	B1	B2
Work	What do you do? What time do you start?	Tell me about a good day and a bad day at work.	Should employers be allowed to track people who work from home?
Food	What do you usually eat for breakfast?	Describe a dish from your childhood. Who made it?	Should cities tax sugary drinks?
Home	How many rooms does your home have?	What would you change about where you live?	Is it better to rent or to buy where you live?
Weekends	What did you do last weekend?	Tell me about the best weekend you've had this year.	Is a four-day work week a good idea?
Travel	Where did you go on your last holiday?	Describe a trip where something went wrong.	Does tourism do more harm than good to small towns?
Shopping	Where do you buy food?	Tell me about something you bought and regretted.	Should shops be open on Sundays?
Health	How often do you do sport?	What is a habit you've tried to change? How did it go?	Should employers pay for staff to go to the gym?
Technology	How many hours a day do you use your phone?	Describe an app you couldn't live without. Why?	Should children under 14 have smartphones?
Learning	Why are you learning English?	Tell me about a teacher who changed something for you.	Should adults pay for their own retraining, or should the state?
Transport	How do you get to work?	Tell me about the worst journey you've had.	Should city centres ban private cars?
Celebrations	What is your favourite holiday?	Describe how your family celebrates it.	Are big weddings worth the money?
The future	What will you do next weekend?	Where would you like to be in five years?	Will most jobs look different in ten years? How?

The B2 column is deliberately a "should" question. It forces a position, and a position forces reasons, which is the speaking B2 asks for.

Build topics around why they're learning

An adult with a move, a job or an exam ahead of them does not need to discuss zodiac signs. They need rehearsal for the conversations that are coming. These topics do double duty: they are conversation practice and they are preparation.

Their goal	Topic	Opening prompt	Language it pulls out
A job interview	Your work history	Walk me through your last two jobs. What did you do day to day?	Past simple, responsibilities, "I was in charge of"
A new workplace	Small talk with colleagues	It's Monday morning. Ask me about my weekend, then tell me about yours.	Question forms, short reactions ("Oh, nice", "That sounds tiring")
Moving abroad	Finding a flat	You're calling about a flat. What do you need to know before you visit?	Polite questions, "Is it possible to", numbers and dates
Healthcare	A doctor's appointment	Describe a time you felt ill. What did you tell the doctor?	Body vocabulary, "It started", "It hurts when"
A speaking exam	Opinion with reasons	Choose one: city or countryside. Give me two reasons and one problem.	Linkers ("on the other hand", "the main reason")
Customer-facing work	Handling a complaint	I'm an unhappy customer. Calm me down and fix my problem.	Apologising, offering, "What I can do is"

Our suggestion: ask the learner in the first lesson what conversation they're most nervous about, and use their answer as the topic for the next month.

Keep one topic going for ten minutes

A topic stalls when every question is the same kind. Climb a ladder instead: fact, then experience, then opinion, then a hypothetical. Here is the ladder on food, for a B1 learner:

1. Fact: What did you have for dinner yesterday?
2. Experience: Tell me about the best meal you've ever had. Where were you?
3. Comparison: How is eating out different here from where you grew up?
4. Opinion: Do people cook less than they used to? Why?
5. Hypothetical: If you opened a restaurant, what would be on the menu?

Each rung asks for a bit more language than the last, and the learner has already warmed up on the easy rung before the hard one arrives. When an answer is short, don't move on. Ask "why?" or "what happened next?" first.

Handle sensitive topics with care

Two moves make a sensitive topic safe without dropping it:

• Move it to the third person. "What do people in your city usually do at weekends?" invites the same language as "What do you do at weekends?" without asking anyone to disclose anything.
• Offer an option. "Tell me about a celebration, yours or one you've seen." The learner chooses how personal to go.

Kindness is one reason. The other is that anxiety changes what a learner can take in.

A look from language learning

Stephen Krashen argued that anxiety acts like a filter between a learner and the language around them: with a high filter, "even if they understand the message, the input will not reach the part of the brain responsible for language acquisition". You may have watched it happen, when a learner who chats freely about cooking can't find the simplest word once the topic turns to their visa. A sensitive topic raises the filter, which is why Krashen told teachers to provide input "in a low anxiety situation".

Stephen Krashen, the Affective Filter hypothesis (1982).

Turn a stalled topic into a role-play

When a learner freezes on open questions even at the right level, turn the topic into a scene with a goal. In our experience the missing piece is usually a reason to speak and a role to speak from, more than the English itself.

Take "home". As a discussion it's "What would you change about where you live?" As a role-play it's: You're calling your landlord. The heating has been broken for three days. Get a date for the repair. Now the learner has a problem to solve with someone on the other end, and the conversation ends when the repair has a date. The same move works for most of the goal topics above: the interview, the doctor, the complaint.

Here is that idea as a Roleplay activity from our public library. The learner reads the scene and plays their turns.

Play a Roleplay scene: checking in at a hotel

If your learner has a specific conversation coming up, you can build the scene around it: their job, their landlord, their exam task.

Put it together

Pick the topic, then pick the column. Start one rung lower than you think, climb the ladder, and save the sensitive topics for when the learner opens the door. If you want more ways to get adults talking on a screen, see speaking activities that work in an online lesson and what makes an activity land with adults.

Sources & further reading

• Global scale, Table 1 (CEFR 3.3): Common Reference Levels. Council of Europe. The level descriptors the graded questions above are built on.
• Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition (Krashen, 1982). Includes the Affective Filter hypothesis and what it means for the classroom.