Remember those Mad Minute math exercises your primary school teachers had you do? Well welcome back to all the fun and excitement of your pre-adolescent days and grammar school fun!
The main purpose of this activity is to get students to think in English a lot faster. You don't want them to have time to translate into and out of their native language.
1) Make up two lists of 20 - 30 questions (Worksheet A and Worksheet B) that can be answered with just a few words.
For example:
How old are you?
Where were you born?
What size shoes do you wear?
2) Break students up into pairs and give each a different worksheet. Students with Worksheet A will start firing off questions to their partner as soon as the teacher says GO. The other students should answer the questions as quickly as possible (and correctly, one would hope). Once this little scene is finished up, turn the tables and have students with Worksheet B run the same thing.
3) Go over the list of questions on the board, teaching different, appropriate responses to each one (there are almost always many different appropriate responses to any given question...despite what beginner textbook writers generally seem to think - Hello. How are you? Fine, thank you. And you? Somebody shoot me).
4) Teacher chooses a couple of students and goes through the activity as a partner a couple of times, once as the asker, and once as the askee.