Speaking Cards — 134 questions, eight categories, one timer
Pick a theme, get a question, answer it out loud. The deck runs from small talk through reflection, hypotheticals, technology, daily life, goals, culture and creativity — 134 prompts in total, or Mix All if you want them shuffled together. The only other control on screen is a timer, and the timer is what makes this more than a question list.
The card takes the social risk
Ask a student directly to tell you about themselves and many freeze. Show them a card asking the same thing and they answer. The difference is where the question came from: a card is a move in a game, a teacher's question is an examination. That small displacement — the deck asked, not a person judging me — is why card formats have outlived every wave of classroom technology, and it is worth preserving. Read the card out yourself as little as possible; let the screen ask.
Sixty seconds is the benchmark that matters
Below C1 there is no more useful speaking target than holding the floor alone for one minute. Build up to it rather than demanding it: twenty seconds in the first weeks, forty by mid-term, sixty as the standard. And teach the three tools that fill the time, explicitly, because students rarely discover them alone — an example (for instance…), a contrast (on the other hand…), and a personal story (actually, last year…). A learner who has those three can always extend an answer; one who does not will stop at fifteen seconds forever.
Choose the category to choose the grammar
The eight themes are not interchangeable, and picking deliberately turns a warm-up into targeted practice. Hypothetical produces conditionals with no grammar heading in sight. Reflection produces past tenses and regret structures. Goals & Dreams produces future forms. Technology and History & Culture pull in the low-frequency vocabulary that everyday conversation never activates. Match the category to whatever the class studied last week and the review happens by itself.
Four formats, same deck
Hot seat: one student at the front answers three consecutive cards, which is the closest thing to exam conditions the format offers. Pairs: partners take turns, doubling talk time and removing the audience. Chain: each student answers and then chooses the category for the next person, which gives the quiet ones a decision to make even when they are not speaking. Written: use the card as a journal prompt and the speaking round becomes a second draft of something already thought through.
What to do while they talk
Not correct. Write. Keep a page for each student and note one thing they did well and one recurring error — not every error, one. Deliver both at the end of the round, to the whole class, without names: "someone used 'I would rather' perfectly today; several of us are still saying 'I am agree'". Interrupting a sixty-second answer to fix a preposition teaches the student that fluency is less important than accuracy, which is the opposite of what this activity exists to build.
Where it fits
A2 to C1, five minutes or fifty. As a warm-up it needs no preparation and no materials. As exam practice it maps directly onto IELTS Speaking Part 2, the Cambridge long turn, and TOEFL independent tasks, all of which ask for one to two minutes of structured monologue from a prompt. The transfer is real: students who have done thirty of these do not panic when the examiner hands them a card, because they have held the floor before.
Goes well with
Further reading
Overcoming Speaking Anxiety — why mingles unlock quiet learners
CEFR Levels Explained — what A1 to C2 actually mean in a classroom