Teaching Expertise

Incorporating dialogue activities can be one of the best ways to help improve your students’ communication skills. These activities will not only enhance their creative writing skills but also offer fun ways to bolster classroom confidence! Use our collection of 15 unique activities to take your student’s communication skills to the next level!

1. Role Play

Role play is a fun and efficient way to practice real-life scenarios and improve communication skills. Make sure to establish clear ground rules and time limits. Students can even choose to enact these scenarios like a play!

Learn more: Game for ESL

2. Question-And-Answer Task

Explore different types of questions and prompt your learners to spend time answering them. This activity is similar to Jeopardy but minus the cash prizes. Establish rules beforehand, or you may end up with more chaos than answers!

Learn more: Elementary Nest

3. Debate Club

Why not start a debate club? It’s a fun and engaging way to improve your students’ communication skills; allowing them to express their thoughts and ideas while learning how to respectfully listen and respond to others.

Learn more: ESU.ORG

4. Improv Night

Host an improv session in your classroom and let your students unleash their creativity! This spontaneous and entertaining dialogue activity requires no scripts and is a great way to encourage dynamic dialogues.

Learn more: Owlcation

5. Quotation Hunt

Search for inspiring quotes and use them as prompts for dialogue writing practice. Remind students to use quotation marks to distinguish them from the rest of the statements in their write-ups.

Learn more: Mensa for Kids

6. Teach Dialogue to Young Writers

Discuss Jon Klassen’s book I Want My Hat Back to explore the importance of dialogue in a story. Then, have students put on their writer’s hats and come up with their own unique dialogues!

Learn more: Walking By The Way

7. Guess Who

“Guess Who” is a fun dialogue activity during which your learners can create conversations with different characters by guessing their identities. They should focus on using their answer sets to expand their vocabulary and improve communication skills.

Learn more: Fit Mag

8. Trivia Challenge

Get your students’ brains buzzing with a Trivia Challenge! This classic dialogue activity helps sharpen their communication and critical thinking skills by challenging students to answer tricky questions in order to earn points.

Learn more: Parade

9. Interview Practice

Have your students role-play a professional interview so that they can understand how to communicate effectively during their future job search. Through engaging in this type of activity, they’ll learn the power of body language and the art of answering tough questions.

Learn more: The Balance

10. Bell Ringer Activity

Engage your students with quick and fun questions to get their brains buzzing. They can create a flowchart that depicts different dialogues or create imaginary dialogues using historical figures!

Learn more: Ditch That Textbook

11. Dialogue Journals

Students can write back and forth to each other in a journal; responding to each other’s questions or sharing their own thoughts. 

Learn more: Teacher Vision

12. Picture Prompts for Writing

Visual cues are a fun way to inspire student conversation-  especially when discussing topics that might be hard to put into words! Have your students analyze and interpret images; making connections between visual and verbal worlds.

Learn more: Write Out Loud

13. Collaborative Comic Creation

This activity promotes creativity, collaboration, and the development of dialogue writing skills. Have your learners work in pairs or small groups to create a comic strip. Each member of the group will take turns adding a panel to the story; using dialogue to move the narrative forward. 

Learn more: Edutopia

14. Alternative Endings

Have your littles read a short story or watch a video clip and discuss what they think the ending should be. They can then work in pairs or small groups to create their own alternative endings;  using dialogue to explain the story’s conclusion.

Learn more: Teacher Starter

15 . Jigsaw Discussions

Divide students into small groups and assign each of them a different topic or theme. Each group member must then conduct research and become an expert in their assigned topic before joining new groups and engaging in conversation to gain new insights and perspectives.

Learn more: Instructional Moves