Lesson

Teaching Animal Vocabulary

Teaching animal vocabulary to ESL students is one of my favourite things in this world. Firstly, I just love animals – even more than I love teaching! I spend my holidays travelling the world, seeing all the amazing animals I can find, and taking photos of them.

When I get back to class, I use my photos to show my students all about this amazing world. Living in China, they are brought up in big apartment buildings where they can barely see any wildlife – maybe just a bird or a stray cat. They think animals belong in zoos.

It’s a privilege to be able to teach them about the wonderful world of animals, and hopefully I can make a difference by bringing up a few hundred students to have some respect for nature that they wouldn’t get taught in any other Chinese class.

To teach the animal vocabulary, I use this Powerpoint presentation:

ESL Animal Vocabulary from David Wills

With higher level students, I have them describe the animals – what they look like, what they eat, where they live, etc. With lower level students it’s probably enough just to teach the names of the animals.

You’ll notice a lack of farmyard animals and pets here… They usually pop up in storybooks and textbooks, so I didn’t bother including them here.

I also like to include a discussion with my intermediate students, using some of the following discussion questions:

What is your favourite animal? Why?
What do you think is the most dangerous animal in the world?
What sort of animals make good pets?
How can humans help protect animals?
How do you feel about zoos?

And for my IELTS students, I’ll use the topic covered in this video I made:

More teaching ideas:

Have students think of their favourite animal and describe it to a partner. The partner should guess what it is. For this, you obviously need to pre-teach words like horn, hoof, stripes, spots, fur, and so on.

David S Wills

I am a writer, editor, and educator. I have written various books on mid-20th century American writers and a few on grammar and IELTS preparation. I have been in the education field since 2008 and have worked in various countries. I started this website to share some ideas and resources to help my fellow teachers.