Drama games are awesome for children and adults because they help build confidence and help students let go of fears and anxieties related to the classroom or language learning. However, sometimes it can be tricky to find drama games for the ESL classroom due to language limitations, so here are 10 games/activities which all levels of English learners can have fun with.

1. The Mirror

This classic game is good for getting kids out of their comfort zone and helping them to not worry about looking “silly” (a common concern for tweens especially.) Put students into pairs. Assign a leader. The leader must slowly do an action and the follower must mimic him or her. It’s simple, but fun, effective, and a good way to improve teamwork and camaraderie in a classroom.

2. Just Dance

Lots of teachers use Just Dance videos as a quick brain break in their classrooms, but it’s also great for getting students to feel more confident and less worried in front of their peers. Pop on a Just Dance and let kids have fun. For older students you might have to “motivate” them with some kind of reward, like team points for the best dancers or an extra point on their next quiz for dancing well. 

This is especially good preparation if your students are going to have to do any performances at any point during the year in front of their parents or other students.

3. Roll the Emotional Dice

Choose a reading, preferably something related to class, like a script or speech your students are trying to learn. Get some dice and make a drawing on the board with pictures of emotions next to the numbers 1-6. You can see an example below.

Now demonstrate to the students what they’re going to do. Roll a dice and read a sentence from the reading out loud in the emotion which you’ve rolled, so if you’ve rolled an unhappy face, try reading and “crying” at the same time. Get students to mimic you and try to get them to be as silly, loud, and animated as possible. 

Ask students to get into small groups. Make sure each group has a copy of the reading and give each group a dice. Now let one person in the group roll and read a sentence (or paragraph) from the reading out loud in the emotion which they’ve rolled. When they’ve finished their sentence, someone else can try, going around the group several times. After letting the groups practice for a while, then you can get everyone to rejoin the class, pull out a big dice, and call on students to read out loud in funny emotions in front of everyone. Let them do it with partners if they’re too scared.

This teaches reading with emotion, hand motions, and intonation. You could do this same activity with pictures of things like robots, lions, and princesses next to each number 1-6, which is especially fun for younger classes.

4. Tongue Twisters

I’ve never met a student, young or old, who didn’t love a good tongue twister. It’s great speaking practice, funny, and lets students speak without worrying about being “good” at it. Everyone, even your shy students, will be raising their hand to try and impress you with they’re excellent reading ability if you let them practice for a few moments on their own first.

Try some of these tongue twisters from Parade.

5. Role Play

Role plays are an ESL teacher’s bread and butter. Before class, decide on a goal and which roles you want your students to play. Role plays work best in small groups, so I recommend choosing 2-4 roles. Here are a few examples below.

Depending on your class and the role plays you’ve chosen, you might need to teach some vocabulary or phrases before students start. It might also be necessary to model a simple role play with some stronger students at the front of the class before letting everyone practice.

Remember to do feedback after the role play. Ask students what decisions they’ve made, ask them how they’re role play went, and ask if anyone wants to reenact their role play in front of the class.

You can also give feedback on grammar and vocabulary at the end of a role play, but I only recommend doing this for very confident classes because your goal here should be building confidence and letting students talk, so don’t worry too much about grammar and vocabulary at this time.

6. Perform a Story in a Small Group

Let students write a short story or script. This may take one or two classes. It’s always best to give students a few guidelines for this, so you don’t wind up with any groups suffering from writer’s block. Give some basic suggestions, such as, “It must be one page long, and the setting must be the beach,” or “It must include 20 past simple sentences, and one character must be a big green monster.”

You can also ask students to do this activity with stories from their class book or which the teacher has chosen but motivation will be much higher if the students have written their own stories or scripts.

When they’re stories are complete, tell them they’re going to perform it in front of the class. Give them plenty of time to gather props, create simple costumes, practice their body language, and practice reading with emphasis and emotions. Since this is for fun and to build confidence, I recommend that you don’t ask students to memorize their stories or scripts. Let them bring their writing to the front of class. The final product won’t be professional, but hopefully it’ll be fun and the less confident students will be much more likely to use body language, costumes, and crazy voices if they don’t also have to worry about memorizing lines. 

You’ll be surprised at how creative and dramatic students can be if you give them a little freedom.

7. Sell It to Me

Choose some random objects and ask students to sell the objects to you. Depending on the language you want students to learn, you might have to pre-teach vocabulary or phrases. Demonstrate how to sell an object in front of the class first. For example, if you have a watering can you can say, “This amazing watering can is only $1.99! You can use it to water your plants, take a shower, or you can even use it as a stylish water bottle. It comes in five different colors: green, blue, yellow, silver, and rainbow unicorn.” You can even try to sell the object to specific students. “Joseph, I heard that you love to drink water. Would you like to add this watering can to your water bottle collection?” It’s okay to be over-the-top and funny. Ideally the students will mimic you, not take the activity “seriously,” and just have fun speaking and using English.

After that let students try to sell their objects in small groups. When everyone has finished, get their feedback on the activity, and then ask a few students to come up and practice selling their object to the class.

8. Dance and Freeze

Play a song, let students move around the class, pause the song, and students have to freeze. To give students extra practice, call out vocabulary words they know and when the song starts playing again, they must act out the words you’ve called out. So if you’ve yelled “snake,” then they have to move around the room like a snake.

Students who don’t freeze in time should sit out.

The odds that you’ll successfully get older students to play this game are low, but this is an awesome grade for elementary or kindergarten kids.

9. One Word Story 

One Word Story is a drama game where you go around the room and each student should say a single word which continues a story. For example, the teacher might say, “Once upon a time there was a…” The student who is next could say, “bear,” and the next student might say, “that,” “liked,” “eating,” “children,” etc.

The trouble with this game is that often in ESL classes a lot of students will completely freeze up and the game will stall a million times. You could make the students who pause for too long sit out of the game, but in the end you’ll just wind up watching the three most confident kids in the class telling a story to each other.

It’s much better to let students do this in small groups. Write your story starter on the board, such as, “Once upon a time there was a…” or “Last weekend at the shopping mall a…” Then call up a few confident students to help you demonstrate what the game should look like. Then split the class into small groups and let them practice amongst themselves. 

After students have practiced a few times, then you can let them practice as a whole class if you like, or you could pull one particularly successful group to the front and let them demonstrate a story.

10. Who’s the…?

Give every student in class a unique paper that says, “You are the _______. Who is the ______?”

Tell students the rules of the game. They are allowed to stand up, talk to whoever they want in the classroom, and make whatever hand motions or body motions they like. They must not be too loud (no shouting). Anyone who is too loud must sit out. They also cannot ask, “Who are you?” and they cannot say who they are. If they ask another player who they are, if they say what they are, or if they show what their paper says, they must sit out.

The goal of the game is to talk to everyone in the classroom in the designated amount of time (give more time for large classes), go sit back down in their chairs when time is up, and then announce who they think their partner was. For example, if their paper said, “Find the dinosaur,” then at the end of the game, they should raise their hand and say, “I think Jaimie is the dinosaur.” If they are correct, then they won!

This game encourages lots of talking, silliness, and is also great for building classroom camaraderie as everyone must talk to one another. You can edit what the papers say based on what vocabulary or topics your students are learning. Here are some examples I’ve used in the past for a class on jobs, but you could also do animals, famous people, personality traits, characters from classroom stories, or whatever you like.

I hope these fun drama games and activities can help your students build confidence in English class. If you have any other fun drama games that are great for ESL, let me know below.

If you want more fun classroom games, try 7 Spelling Games – That Actually Help Students Learn to Spell.