You ask a question, and the screen goes quiet. Someone's mic is muted, someone's looking away, and you end up filling the silence yourself. Online lessons strip out the small cues that prompt talk in a room, so speaking has to be built in, not hoped for.
The reliable ones all share a feature: the learner has a concrete reason to say something, not just permission to.
Match the activity to the level
| Activity | Level | What it pushes |
|---|---|---|
| Describe-and-guess | A1+ | producing vocabulary, working around gaps |
| Information gap | A2+ | asking questions, negotiating meaning |
| Retell from a prompt | A2+ | connected speech, past tense |
| Role-play a real scenario | B1+ | functional language and register |
| Opinion / would-you-rather | B1+ | spontaneous, fluent production |
"Do you like coffee?" gets you "yes" and a longer silence. Activities that can be finished in one word aren't speaking activities. Build in a gap the learner has to talk across to close.
There's a reason "being pushed to produce" matters more than one more listening exercise.
For years the field emphasised input: understand enough language and you'll acquire it. Then Merrill Swain noticed her immersion students understood beautifully and still spoke haltingly. Her output hypothesis argues that being pushed to produce language, and noticing the gap between what you mean and what you can say, is itself a driver of learning. Input alone doesn't get there. So the speaking slot isn't a reward after the "real" learning. It's where a lot of the learning happens.
Merrill Swain, the output hypothesis.
Production also needs low-stakes reps before the live moment. A quick type-it-from-memory game primes the words so they're there when the learner has to speak.
Prime the words first
Type the verb in brackets in the right tense: present perfect or past simple.
The point
Don't wait for speaking to happen; design a reason for it, and match the reason to the level. If your learners are adults specifically, what works for adult classes is its own thing.
Sources & further reading
- Second-language acquisition. Input, output, and how the two combine.
- The testing effect. Why retrieval before production makes the words available.
Written by
Builder at Lingoken
By day I build, and I love teaching kids to code. On weekends I dance, contemporary and Kathak. Languages are the thing I keep coming back to: I grew up between a few (Sindhi, Hindi, Marathi, English) and I'm still happily stumbling through Spanish, Telugu, and Malayalam. That slow, enjoyable business of actually learning a language convinced me practice has to be something you want to do, which is what we're building at Lingoken. I write here about making language activities people genuinely enjoy.
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