Hobby Market — one thousand dollars and a room full of things to sell
Each student builds a profile, lists two or three of their own hobbies, and receives a budget of $1,000. Then the market opens. They circulate, pitch what they do — chess, baking, fishing, gaming — and try to sell it to classmates, while spending their own budget on the pitches that convinced them. The app tracks both sides: what you earned and what you have left. The session ends when the moderator closes the market and the reports come out.
The budget is what stops the activity dying
"Tell the class about your hobby" produces a one-minute monologue, polite silence, and the next student. Attaching money changes the incentive completely: a buyer with $1,000 to spend has a reason to ask questions, compare offers, and refuse politely. The listener stops being an audience and becomes a customer. That is the whole design, and it is why the room stays loud for twenty minutes.
The pitch improves because they give it six times
Rehearsal is built in. A student pitches the same hobby to every buyer they meet, and the fourth version is audibly better than the first — tighter, with the boring part cut and a hook at the front. Point this out afterwards. Note down a first pitch and a final pitch from the same student and read both back to the class. Students rarely get to hear their own improvement inside a single lesson, and it is persuasive evidence that speaking practice works.
Functional language the transaction cannot avoid
Selling requires recommending and comparing. Buying requires asking about price, hedging, and refusing without offence — that sounds interesting, but I have already spent most of my budget. Bargaining requires conditionals: if you take two sessions, I can do it for eight hundred. None of this needs teaching in advance; it needs a reason to appear, and the market supplies one.
Run it in two phases, not one
Give five minutes for profiles, then ten minutes where students may only talk and listen — no money changes hands. Only then open trading for twenty minutes. Skipping the talking-only phase collapses the activity into transactions: students buy from their friends in the first two minutes, the budget is gone, and nobody has listened to a pitch. The separation is what forces them to hear everyone before spending.
The closing report is the second lesson
When the market closes, each student has a record of who they bought from and what they earned. Use it. Ask the top seller to pitch once more to the whole class, then ask the room what made it work — was it the opening question, the price, the enthusiasm? That discussion is spontaneous evaluation, and it is the most analytical English of the session. Finish by asking each student to name the one hobby they now want to try.
Level and setting
B1 and above, forty to fifty minutes, and it needs space to move. Adults and older teenagers take to the commercial framing immediately. With a weaker group, put four phrases on the board before you start — one for opening, one for asking price, one for bargaining, one for refusing — and require each student to use all four at least once before the market closes.
Goes well with
Further reading
Group Dynamics in Large Classes — making thirty students talk
Gamification in Language Learning — why scoring changes behaviour