Teaching ESL Speaking Through Perspective-Taking Activities

🎯 Introduction

Many ESL speaking tasks focus on sharing personal opinions, but real communication often requires understanding other viewpoints. Perspective-taking activities push learners to speak beyond themselves by imagining how others think and feel. This post shows TEFL teachers how to use perspective-based tasks to build deeper, more meaningful speaking practice.

📄 Why It Matters / Why It Works

Perspective-taking increases cognitive engagement. When students speak from another point of view, they must adjust vocabulary, tone, and reasoning. This encourages longer responses, more complex sentence structures, and stronger pragmatic awareness. It also mirrors real-world communication skills such as negotiation, empathy, and explanation.

📚 Practical Teaching Strategies / Steps / Activities

1. Role Viewpoint Cards

Give students cards with different identities (parent, student, manager, tourist).Present a situation and ask students to speak from their assigned viewpoint.This creates natural contrast in language use.

2. Same Situation, Different Voices

Students describe the same event from two different perspectives.Example: a late delivery from the customer’s view and the driver’s view.This promotes flexibility and explanation.

3. Opinion Shift Task

Students state an opinion, then switch and defend the opposite position.This builds reasoning language and discourse markers.

4. Problem from Both Sides

Groups analyze a conflict by explaining both sides before suggesting a solution.This encourages balanced, extended discussion.

5. Reflection on Language Change

After speaking, students reflect on how their language changed by perspective.This builds awareness of tone and purpose.

💡 Pro Tip

Provide sentence starters like “From their point of view…” to support lower-level learners without limiting output.

📌 Final Thought

Perspective-taking transforms speaking into thoughtful communication. GoTEFL helps teachers design deeper speaking tasks, while TEIK places educators in classrooms where empathy and expression strengthen real-world English use.