15 Study Stage Activities and Drills for ESA Lessons

The Study stage of an Engage–Study–Activate (ESA) lesson plan is where students focus directly on language. This may involve grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or functional language, with attention given to meaning, form and pronunciation.

However, the Study stage should not mean spending 20 minutes explaining grammar followed by a worksheet. Effective Study stages give students multiple opportunities to work with the target language and gradually develop accuracy and confidence.

One useful progression is to move from controlled Study toward communicative Study. Students initially receive considerable support, but that support gradually decreases as they become more comfortable with the language.

Here are 15 Study stage activities and drills English teachers can incorporate into ESA lesson plans.

1. Gap-Fill Exercises

Gap-fills are one of the simplest forms of controlled practice. Students complete sentences using the correct vocabulary item or grammatical form.

Gap-fills are particularly useful immediately after presenting new language because students can concentrate on accuracy without having to generate complete sentences themselves.

2. Substitution Drills

Students receive a model sentence and substitute different words while maintaining the target structure.

Substitution drills can help students develop automaticity with new structures.

3. Transformation Drills

Transformation drills require students to change a sentence according to instructions.

Teachers can use transformations to practise affirmative, negative and interrogative forms, verb tenses, active/passive structures and many other language features.

4. Question-and-Answer Drills

Students repeatedly practise a target question-and-answer structure using different prompts.

When practising the present perfect, for example:

The teacher can gradually introduce different verbs, subjects and contexts while maintaining the target structure.

5. Sentence Completion

Give students sentence beginnings that encourage use of the target language.

When teaching the second conditional:

Students have some freedom over the information they provide while still practising a specific structure.

6. Matching Activities

Students can match vocabulary to definitions, questions to answers, sentence halves or expressions to situations.

Matching activities work particularly well when students are first becoming familiar with new language because they require recognition before production.

7. Sentence Unscrambles

Provide students with words in the wrong order:

This helps students notice word order, auxiliary placement and other aspects of sentence structure.

8. Error Correction

Give students sentences containing common errors:

Error-correction activities can be particularly effective when the examples reflect mistakes students actually make.

9. Pronunciation Drills

Study is not limited to grammar and vocabulary. Students also need opportunities to practise pronunciation.

Teachers can focus on individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress, contractions, intonation or connected speech.

The goal is not necessarily to eliminate accents, but to help students communicate more clearly and understand natural spoken English.

10. Backchaining

Long sentences can be difficult to pronounce fluently. Backchaining breaks them into manageable sections, beginning at the end.

Students gradually build toward producing the entire sentence naturally.

11. Controlled Dialogues

Provide students with a short dialogue containing the target language. Students practise it in pairs before changing selected information.

Students can then substitute different weekend plans while retaining the structure.

12. Picture-Prompt Drills

Pictures can provide prompts without requiring written sentences.

When practising the present continuous, for example, students see pictures of people performing different activities and produce:

As students improve, teachers can remove additional prompts.

13. Information-Gap Activities

Information gaps introduce genuine communication into Study.

Student A and Student B receive different information and must communicate to complete the missing details.

For example, students might receive incomplete schedules and ask:

Although communication is genuine, the teacher still designs the activity to generate repeated practice of the target language.

14. Find Someone Who

Students receive prompts such as:

This creates considerable interaction while maintaining a clear language focus.

15. Class Surveys

Surveys move students even further toward communicative practice.

Students might interview classmates about habits using adverbs of frequency:

They can then summarize their findings for the class.

From Controlled to Communicative Study

The strongest Study stages rarely rely on a single activity. Instead, teachers can gradually reduce the amount of support they provide.

A lesson might begin with a gap-fill, move into a substitution or question-and-answer drill, and finish with an information gap or class survey.

The progression becomes:

Importantly, an activity does not automatically become Activate simply because students are communicating. During communicative Study, the teacher is still deliberately designing the interaction to produce repeated use of specific target language.

Once students have developed sufficient confidence and accuracy, the teacher can reduce that control further. That is when the lesson is ready to move toward Activate stage activities, where students use English more independently to achieve a genuine communicative outcome.