When asked why they’re learning English, most people will give one of these three reasons: work, social life or travel. If you would like to help your students improve their English related to the area of travel and tourism, keep reading to discover some really effective no-prep lesson ideas that are bound to be a hit in your classroom.
1. The Gibberish auction
The gibberish austion is lots of fun for all the parties involved. Divide your students into teams and project or print and hand out a copy of the gibberish auction. The students must decide if the statements make sense or not and bet between $10 and $100 dollars on each one. For each correct answer, they get the money they bet and they lose the money they bet if they are incorrect. The scores are added at the end to see who won. Lots of laughter guaranteed.
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2. At a travel agent’s – role play
Role plays are great if you’re teaching groups because they allow for everyone to speak at the same time. They provide real-life scenarios and help students develop fluency while also teaching them skills used in real-world situations such as negotiating, persuading, debating, etc. They are also heaps of fun for the students as they allow them to adopt various roles and enjoy acting them out.
For this particular role play you need a bunch of old travel brochures or magazines. Just grab a few freebies from your local travel agent’s and cut out some photos. Alternatively, print out some holiday brochures from the web. Make sure they don’t have too much text, mainly pictures, so the students don’t read too much. Ideally, divide the visuals into themes such as South America explorer, The cultural gems of Europe, etc. Split your students up evenly into two groups: travel agents and travellers. Give each travel agent a bunch of photos and ask them to create a holiday offer including details such as transport, accommodation options, attractions, etc. While the travel agents are working on their sales pitches, ask the would-be-travellers about their dream expectations and elicit questions they might want to ask the travel agents.
Once the travel agents are ready, get the travellers and travel agents to sit in front of each other and discuss the travel options. Make sure each traveller visits every travel agent. The objective for the travellers is to find a holiday offer that ticks all the boxes for them and for the travel agents to sell as many package holidays as possible. Get feedback at the end to see which travel destination was the most successful.
3. This or that – what would you rather?
A fun game of quick decisions and a great practice on justifying choices. Ask your students:
Which of the two alternatives would you choose and why. Give me two reasons. But remember, you only get to keep the card if your answer is 100% correct grammatically and if it makes sense logically. Go!
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4. My bucket list infographic
Allow your students to get creative. Have them log into Canva, bring up a few infographic templates and let them have fun designing the holiday of their dreams, putting together a personal bucket list or outlining all the must-see tourist attractions in your region. Run a contest for the most informative and visually-pleasing infographic.
5. Test your travel-related vocabulary interactive quiz
Do you want to know how travel vocab savvy your students already are? How about a quick interactive quiz that will offer an immediate result?
Test your travel-related vocabulary quiz is available for free on our website and you can also download it in PDF version.
Test your travel-related vocabulary – Three Wise Kangaroos
6. Explain the word and ask me a question
Here’s another engaging activity you can do as a whole class competition or in pairs. Simply cut out the cards and distribute them amongst the students. They must then take turns explaining the words to each other or their teams. As a follow up, ask the students to write questions using the target vocabulary, for example:
Have you even been on a long-haul flight?
Do you usually plan your itinerary in detail?
What’s your favourite holiday destination and why?
To crank up the fun, you could set the timer to 2 minutes and see how many words the students can explain to their teams in that time.
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7. Act it out
If you’ve introduced the students to some vocabulary and would like them to put it into practice, challenge them to write the script for an episode of a sitcom with the characters going on holiday or spending a holiday somewhere. Of course acting out a scene would naturally follow and this is guaranteed fun for everybody involved. Well worth a try.
An alternative to this activity would be writing a script for a stand-up comedy show and acting it out. For inspiration, show your students one of the following sketches and see if they can create something in a similar fashion.
British people on holiday:
[BEST]Michael Mcintyre British People on Holiday (youtube.com)
The joys of air travel:
Compilation Of Michael’s Best Jokes About Planes And Airports | Michael McIntyre (youtube.com)
8. Confusing pairs
Do your students know the difference between words like ‘trip’ and ‘journey’ or ‘tourist’ and ‘traveller’? You can test their understanding of the differences by playing another game. Simply put the words in a grid for a noughts and crosses game and let your students explain the difference to you. If you’re struggling for ideas on confusing words related to travel, you will find a whole unit devoted to them in our English for Travel e-book.
Check it out here:
English for Travel – Three Wise Kangaroos
9. Pictionary with idioms
English is so creative when it comes to idioms and there is a whole array of idioms related to travel: the world is your oyster, to travel on a shoestring, to live out of a suitcase, to thumb a lift, to name but a few. Why not play a little game of pictionary with the travel idioms? A student must pick an idiom at random and present it on the board using pictures only for his/her team to guess. If you want to save yourself the trouble of looking for travel-related idioms, we have two units devoted to those in our English for Travel e-book too. Not only that, but also 20 other units ready to be used and loved by your students. There’s a bit on British and American English, a ton of useful collocations, a vocabulary race, a travel trivia quiz, mini dialogues, picture talk time, challenges and much more.
Check it out here:
English for Travel – Three Wise Kangaroos
10. Communicative phrasal verbs
Last but not least, why not introduce your students to some super useful phrasal verbs related to travel and tourism? It so happens we have just the resource you need. Our Communicative Phrasal Verbs e-book contains 20 units, including one on travel and tourism, with over 200 commonly used phrasal verbs presented in context with matching exercises. It is focused on communication and offers additional practice in the form of revision sheets, mini dialogues and study cards.
Check it out here:
Communicative Phrasal Verbs – Three Wise Kangaroos
You will also be pleased to know that all our resources are reduced by 20% until 15th Aug so the best time to shop is now.
Shop all e-books:
Shop – Three Wise Kangaroos
Happy teaching and till next time!
Gaby
