Beginner Tongue Twisters Worksheet & Classroom Activities (ESL/EFL)

[Tongue Twister Worksheet | Tongue Twister Activities]

Easy Tongue Twisters for ESL Beginners

Level: Beginner to Pre-Intermediate
Focus: Pronunciation
DownloadEasy-Tongue-Twisters-ESL.doc


Tongue twisters can be fun to focus on for 5/10 minutes as warm up or at the end of an English class.

This worksheet contains 7 English tongue twisters. I made it for the grade 6 students at my Japanese school. These are not the most difficult tongue twisters in English. The tongue twisters start easy and get a bit harder by the end of the sheet. A few of them focus on the pronunciation of L-R sounds (e.g. Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry) and the S-SH sounds (e.g. Sea vs She). This is useful pronunciation practice for Japanese students of English in particular.

Here is a preview of the worksheet:

Simple Tongue Twisters for beginners

Classroom Activities with Tongue Twisters

Tongue Twister Contest

  • First, assign points to each tongue twister according to its difficulty (you can do this by modifying the worksheet). Write a number of points beside each tongue twister, print it out and give it to your students.
  • Practice them (to start, maybe only work with the top 3 tongue twisters).
  • Divide the students in groups of 3 or 4.
  • Each group then gets a chance to try one tongue twister. One group member picks a tongue twister and then says it aloud. After he/she is done, one member from each other groups has a chance to say it.  The team with the student who pronounces it the best gets the points.
  • The team who gets the points gets to choose which tongue twister to do next.

Note: Don't let the advanced students take all the turns. Each member should have a turn at saying a tongue twister.

Tongue Twister Race

Another idea is to have a tongue twister race. After the students are more familiar with the tongue twisters, you can have them do a race. You need a stopwatch for this activity.

  • Put the students in groups.
  • Have them do rock-paper-scissors to decide who goes first.
  • The members of the first group then try to say all the tongue twisters, one after another, as fast as they can.
  • The other groups then try to beat this time.
  • The group with the fastest time wins.

This activity might be better suited for more advanced students with more complex tongue twisters that are longer and difficult to say in sequence.

Have fun.

- Matthew Barton / Englishcurrent.com

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6 comments on “Beginner Tongue Twisters Worksheet & Classroom Activities (ESL/EFL)

  1. elke (Posted on 5-6-2014 at 09:01) Reply

    I like it very much and could use it for my students.

    thank you

  2. miriam (Posted on 3-11-2015 at 22:02) Reply

    thank you for sharing, this is very helpful i have been using it to practice with students grade 5 and 6 so far so good my kids are really improving and enjoying too .i use it as a routine after greetings and warm up questions before every english lesson i take 2 mins for tongue twisters i started with 2 now grade 6 since they are almost to graduate i had to speed up the pace albeit they can say all .we started slowly then i kept adding the speed as the time goes by .once again thank you

  3. Jeff Clark (Posted on 5-31-2016 at 22:07) Reply

    Great work and fun for the students!

  4. Ankita Mahapatra (Posted on 2-28-2017 at 12:00) Reply

    WOW TOUNGE TWISTERSSSSSSSS………. .FANTASTIC…..

  5. nitin (Posted on 8-16-2017 at 10:11) Reply

    This is a nice website

  6. faruq (Posted on 6-5-2020 at 00:23) Reply

    nice website!…

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