Good and bad responses (TEFLtastic Classics Part 37)

The first in a few additions to my occasional series on the most adaptable games/ activities in TEFL, revived due to finding that there are some real TEFL classics that are in my new e-book and I use all the time but had never got round to mentioning. If you like anything here and want more, please support TEFLtastic.

This activity was inspired by TOEIC (not an expression that you’ll hear very often!), specifically the part of the listening where students try to spot the one correct response to the thing that the first speaker said. The actual exam exercise has some typical TOEIC problems like being more a vocab test than actual listening practice. However, the idea is a great way of moving from learning useful functional language phrases to starting to put them into dialogues, as well as dealing with common mistakes such as “How do you do?” “I’m fine, thank you”.

Possible adaptations include:

• having as many responses as are useful for each question (rather than always three)
• doing the whole thing for just one language point (e.g. telephoning)
• teaching more language by having two or more good responses, and getting students to spot the one bad responses
• moving onto students testing each other in the same way, seeing if they respond with no help, and then building dialogues starting with one of the phrases

Here are some I prepared earlier:

Good and bad answers in IELTS Speaking Part One (in this very cheap e-book) – NEW

Good and bad answers in IELTS Speaking Part Three (in this very cheap e-book) – NEW

Good and bad responses at the beginning of meetings (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad responses at the end of meetings (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad responses in the body of meetings (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad Q&A responses (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad telephoning responses instructions and cards (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad starting telephone calls responses (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad ending phone calls responses (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad responses in the body of a phone call (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad travel English responses

Good and bad negotiating responses

Good and bad telephoning responses

Good and bad responses in restaurants (in this very cheap e-book)

Good and bad small talk responses (in this very cheap e-book)

Also useful:

• good and bad responses to requests
• good and bad responses in presentation Q&A sessions
• good and bad responses in meetings
• good and bad responses in teleconferences and video conferences
• arrangements good and bad responses
• good and bad responses for security guards

All of which I have tried and will be in e-books on the topics sometime soonish. In the meantime, please check out the other TEFLtastic classic posts, well worth a look even if you have before, as I continually update them with links to new photocopiable versions.

Updated 18 July 2022