Pictures cut from magazines and newspapers can go a long way in the ESL classroom. One of my favorite speaking/writing activities is to use pictures of people to get students to practice description.

For children and beginners, divide the students into groups and give each group several photographs. Have each student describe the physical characteristics of one of the people in the photos without indicating which one they’ve chosen. The other students have to guess which person is being described.

In Part I, I talked about using pictures of people to introduce target language used to describe people in terms of both physical characteristics (beginners) and personality types (intermediate and advanced). As a follow-up activity for intermediate and advanced learners, have the students choose pairs of pictures and explain why they think the pairs would make good friends, good couples, good co-workers, etc. For fun, end the activity by having the students decide which pairs would make the worst friends, couples, etc.