5 Delicious ESL Food Activities
5 Delicious ESL Food Activities
Learning how to talk about food and drink is essential for language students. Buying and ordering food is one of the most frequent challenges travellers face in a foreign country, while being able to take orders in English is an extremely marketable skill for those working in tourist hotspots.
Beyond that, we all love to talk about food! It’s such a common conversation topic that can help us connect with almost anyone, and get a real flavour (pun intended!) of different cultures. Eating out, cooking and healthy eating are all interests that many students are eager to be able to express themselves about.
It’s no surprise then that you’ll find language related to food and drink crop up throughout textbooks. From basic vocabulary and likes and dislikes to useful ordering phrases and cooking verbs, mastering these areas is critical to student success.
So how do we keep ESL classroom activities for food and drink fun and fresh for students? We’ve found that recreating different scenarios in which we encounter food works really well – food is so ingrained in our daily lives that there are plenty of moments we can build creative activities around.
With that in mind, here are 5 of our favourite ESL activities for food and drink, that will help students build confidence in understanding and producing language associated with this topic. We’ve provided an overview of each activity here, but for full instructions just click on the title of an activity.
Starting at the easier end of the spectrum, Something In Common is a great way to practise likes and dislikes. As the name suggests, students have to find something in common with each of their classmates, then report back to the rest of class. For example, “Monica and I both like sushi”, or “Yanming and I both hate broccoli”.
To find these things out, students should use full questions and answers such as “Do you like broccoli?” and “No, I hate broccoli!”. Make sure you model and enforce this language!
This works particularly well for food and drink because students are likely to have opinions on most items. You can also expand from just likes and dislikes in common to how frequently students eat or drink things (adverbs of frequency), things eaten or drunk yesterday (past simple), or things students have never eaten or drunk (present perfect simple).
Another activity suitable for beginner (and intermediate) students is Create A Menu. In this activity, pairs of students write a list of dishes and drinks that their imagined restaurant serves, then share it with the class. One of our top tips is to assign different types of cuisines in a kind of ‘food hall’ scenario – that way you’ll get more variety than 10 pizzerias!
To practise food vocabulary words, make sure you ask students to list the ingredients for each dish. At higher levels, students could also write a description of each dish using relevant adjectives (e.g., spicy, freshly chopped). Either way, show the class an example of a real menu to help explain the task.
Getting students into the mindset that they are starting their own restaurant (for example by asking students to think of a name and location too) can really help with motivation for this one. With the right class you might even want to allow a signature cocktail! For younger or more artistic students it can be great to make this activity into more of a project in which they create realistic menus to display around the classroom, or use in our Classroom Restaurant activity below.
Perhaps the most popular ESL food activity with students is Classroom Restaurant. In this activity, you replicate a real restaurant scenario, and get students to play the parts of diners and servers. This is a great way to practise useful phrases for ordering food and drinks, and interactions at a restaurant in general. Stepping through useful phrases at different stages of the meal (e.g., “A table for 2 please”, “What would you like to drink?”) beforehand, and having them on the board to refer to, is appropriate for some classes.
To make this activity work well, you’ll need physical menus. One option is to print a menu from a real restaurant, in which case be sure to pick one suitable for your class level and target vocabulary. Another is to customise one of the free templates available in Adobe Express, such as the one in the image below. Alternatively, it can be really fun to use menus that your students created in the Create A Menu activity above. This allows students to ‘visit’ each other’s restaurants.
In general, the key to getting students into Classroom Restaurant is to set the scene as much as possible. As well as the menus, why not transform the classroom during a break – turn down the lights, play some background music, arrange the tables like a restaurant, or even try tablecloths and paper plates! Get students to come in as groups of friends or couples, and give more advanced students personality traits (e.g., an argumentative couple, a clumsy waiter).
To practise writing and producing target language connected to food in a more controlled format, the Iron Chef activity is a great option. Here, students create a meal from a set of random ingredients; first they develop it with a partner, then they share it with the class. Two teams of students get the same ingredients, and ‘battle’ to create the meal that their classmates will like the best. You can dial up or down the level of competitiveness you emphasise depending on your class!
In the original TV show, chefs prepare a meal based around one secret or theme ingredient (see the video below!). In class, it can often work better if you assign three, five or even ten random ingredients to the teams in each battle. Our Random Word Generator is a great tool for this. Make sure you specify that the final meal must include at least ten ingredients, including those that were assigned.
At lower levels, you can just practise food vocabulary (and some simple adjectives) by asking students to create a description of their meal. If possible though, get students to describe how they created their meal as well. That way you can practise both sequence adverbs and cooking verbs in the past simple. For example, “We made a delicious spaghetti in tomato sauce. First, we chopped the onion…”.
Finally, to practise speaking fluency and confidence with more advanced students, we recommend the Celebrity Chefs activity. In this activity, students develop and present a recipe to the class in the style of a chef on a TV show. Depending on how outgoing and confident your students are, you can either get them to do this individually or in pairs (some students will feel much more comfortable if someone is presenting with them). If students will work individually, having them develop the recipe for homework is a good option.
A great way to introduce this activity is by showing a video of a celebrity chef presenting a recipe (the example below is a classic British recipe). Ask them to write down any target language that they hear (e.g., food vocabulary, adjectives, adverbs). Then, have a short class discussion on any chefs they know, who is famous in their country, and if they have a favourite chef. When leading on to the activity instructions, point out how celebrity chefs are enthusiastic in their manner and language when presenting their food, and ask them to emulate this style!
After the presentations, ask the students to write down one of the recipes that they heard (not a friend or someone sitting near them). Hinting that they will need to do this before the presentations is a great way to make sure students pay attention to their classmates! Students then share their version of the recipe, and the person who presented the original judges how close they were.
