Teacher's Corner

5 Awesome Activities for Teaching Slang

Understanding slang will help your students learn how to communicate more naturally. These vocabulary-building activities can be used individually as part of a lesson or together to create a more comprehensive course on English slang. Feel free to adapt or change these games and activities according to the level and age of your students.

1. Matching game

Prepare two lists: one of slang words and another of their definitions or proper English equivalents. Cut these lists into pieces, cutting out the word or phrase for each expression and definition. In class, distribute the pieces to your students.

Once everyone has received a piece of paper, the students must walk around the classroom and try to find the definition to their slang word or the slang word for their definition.

When students think they have a match, they should bring it to you for confirmation. If it’s correct, lay the two pieces out on your desk and ask them to write the expression and definition on the board. Once all the words and definitions have been matched, go over the terms together.

Alternatively, you can set up this activity is by cutting up multiple lists of the words and their definitions, and this time, distributing a whole set of expressions and definitions to a group of students. They must then work in their groups to match all the words and definitions. The first group to complete all the matches wins the activity.

Tip: As an added bonus activity, ask your students to come up with a sentence using one of the words on the list.

2. Rewrite the sentences

This lesson is best for review of slang words and phrases. You’ll probably need to pre-teach some slang beforehand to have success with this lesson.

To get started, prepare a worksheet of sentences using formal phrases or slang phrases. In class, distribute these worksheets to your students. Have them work individually or in small groups to rewrite the sentences, translating them from formal English to slang, or vice versa. This will help them exercise their knowledge of slang, as well as learn how to use it correctly in everyday conversations.

Tip: For younger students or learners at a lower level, consider providing a “word bank” from which they can choose the proper phrase to use.

For a challenging, but fun variation of this exercises, turn this activity into a game or competition. Don’t pre-teach the slang phrases. Instead, have your students use contextual clues to come up with answers. In this case, it’ll be very important to make sure everyone knows the correct answers at the end.

3. Fill in the missing slang

This activity will help students practice using the various slang words and phrases they’ve learned in class.

You’ll need to take some time before class to properly prepare this activity. You can write your own story, or you can find stories online. For example, the story “Red Flowers Make Her See Red” has the phrase “to be through” which means “done,” as well as “got it?”—slang for “Do you understand?”

The story also lends itself to rewriting and you could substitute in more slang before you give it to your students.

There are two ways to conduct this lesson: You can either remove all of the slang phrases from the story and leave the spaces blank, or highlight various words and phrases so that students can easily spot them and translate them into their slang versions. Whichever route you take, don’t forget to make copies of the story to bring to class.

Tip: For younger classes, consider providing a “word bank” where you list the various slang phrases that should appear in the story.

Once you’ve passed out the story, have the students work individually or in small groups of three or four where they’ll read the story to themselves. In the first version of the activity, students should fill in the missing slang words and phrases. If you opt for the second version, students should translate the highlighted phrases into slang.

For example, if the story starts out with “We studied all night, but still barely passed the test” the students should replace the bolded phrases with “We crammed.” Save time at the end of the lesson to share and go over the correct answers.

Tip: If writing your own story, make sure you use the slang words in a way that requires different conjugations and tenses for an added element of English grammar practice.

4. Create your own dialogue

This is a fun way to get your students speaking and practicing slang in a more realistic setting.

Divide students into pairs or small groups. Assign each group a handful of the slang words you’ve covered in previous lessons. Instruct the students to create a dialogue or short skit that includes their assigned slang words. Every student should have a speaking role and the words should be used correctly.

Tip: You may want to have the students write down their dialogues or skit scripts so you can collect them and check for spelling and grammar.

Save time at the end of the lesson for the students to perform their dialogues or skits. Make sure you review any mistakes the students make for the whole class to learn from.

5. Listen for the slang

American TV shows are littered with slang. Watching an episode of your favorite sitcom or drama will reveal just how common slang actually is in day-to-day situations. Your students will enjoy learning about slang by watching some American TV.

Show an episode of an American TV show, like “How I Met Your Mother”—which has frequent examples of “awesome” and “What’s up?”—or “The Big Bang Theory.” Both are filled with common slang words and phrases. The idea is to find an episode that has a lot of examples of slang. Just remember to watch the episode or video yourself before teaching the lesson so that you can take note of all the uses of slang.

Before introducing the video to your students, it’s a good idea to pre-teach or familiarize the students with the phrases they’ll come across in the episode. As students encounter various words and phrases, instruct them to write down all the examples of slang they hear and how often it appears in the episode as they watch the show.

At the end of the video or episode, discuss what the students discovered. Determine whether they were able to find all the slang words and phrases. If there are phrases they don’t understand, provide them with sample sentences providing the context in which the slang is used.