B1 Speaking Prompts: Do me a favour

Age: 20-125

ESL Level: CEFR B1

Type: role-play (3 pages in PDF format to print and cut up)

Target language: Asking for a favour, accepting or refusing to help, reacting to ‘thank you’

Description of activities: Students work in pairs. They have 14 situations. In half of these they ask for a favour, in the other half they need to react to the request.

Students are asked to role-play a dialogue.

They can swap partners after two situations in order to talk to many classmates.

For further language training, there are 7 expressions we use when accepting or refusing a request and 7 ways of reacting to ‘thank you’. Each student gets a set of these expressions (or copy them into their notebook). The aim of the task is to use as many of these expressions as possible. You can also think of a reward for the first three students who are able to insert these expressions into their dialogues accurately before their peers.

Finish the activity with an open-class feedback session discussing the general outcomes of the role-plays.

Time: 45 min

Font: American Typewriter, Garamond