A Wordwall Alternative for ESL Speaking Practice
Wordwall is a genuinely useful tool — over 600,000 educators use it, according to its own pricing page, and its free plan alone covers a real classroom need: quick recall games with almost no setup. But go through its full template list and count how many actually require a student to speak, unscripted, without a right answer already loaded into the system. As of today, the honest count is zero. Every Wordwall format — quiz, matching pairs, crossword, hangman, wordsearch — is built around finding or typing a predetermined answer, not producing language on the spot.
That's not a criticism of Wordwall. It's not what it's for. But if you're specifically looking for a Wordwall alternative because your classes need speaking output — not another round of matching pairs — the gap is worth naming clearly before you go looking for what fills it.
What Wordwall actually does well
Wordwall's free Basic plan lets you create up to three activities across 12 templates, with basic sharing. Paid tiers start at €5/month (Standard) for unlimited activities, AI-assisted content generation, and access to over 25 million community-made resources; €7.50/month (Pro) adds 22 more templates — 34 total — plus early access to new ones. That's a real, well-priced tool for building quizzes, vocabulary games, and printable activities fast, and it's why so many teachers already have it bookmarked.
Where it's strong: recall, recognition, and matching. A gameshow quiz to review last week's vocabulary, a crossword to reinforce spelling, a wordsearch as a five-minute settler — Wordwall handles all of that well, and the AI-assisted content generation on paid tiers means you're not typing every question by hand.
Where the gap is
None of that is speaking practice. A student typing the answer to a quiz question, or dragging a word into the right slot, is doing recognition work — useful, but passive compared to constructing a sentence out loud and defending it to a partner. If your lesson plan needs students producing spoken English with no script and no single correct answer, Wordwall's template list doesn't have a format for that, because that's not the problem it was built to solve.
This is the actual gap a Wordwall alternative for ESL speaking practice needs to close: not "another game maker," but a way to generate speaking prompts that change every time, calibrated to a CEFR level, without the teacher writing new material every week.
A concrete version of the problem: a B1 class that's already done a Wordwall matching game on travel vocabulary still can't hold a 90-second conversation about a trip they took, because matching a word to its definition and producing that word in a spontaneous sentence are different skills. The first is recognition. The second is what shows up on a speaking exam, in a job interview in English, or in an actual conversation with a tourist asking for directions. A template library built for the first skill isn't going to develop the second one just because the vocabulary overlaps.
Why CEFR calibration matters more than it sounds
Wordwall's templates are level-agnostic by design — a crossword is a crossword whether the class is A2 or C1, and the teacher decides the difficulty by choosing which words go in it. That's fine for vocabulary review, where the teacher already knows exactly which words the class needs. It's a bigger problem for speaking prompts, where an A2 student and a C1 student need genuinely different scaffolding, not just different vocabulary — different sentence complexity, different amounts of structure, different tolerance for ambiguity in the prompt itself.
That's the specific thing a CEFR-constrained generator solves that a template can't: the same app, set to a different level, produces a structurally different prompt, not just a harder version of the same one. A Spin & Speak topic generated for A2 gives a concrete, narrow prompt ("describe your favorite meal"); the same app at C1 gives something open-ended enough to require real argumentation. Neither is the teacher manually simplifying language after the fact — the constraint is built into what gets generated.
Wordwall vs. English, no kidding: the honest comparison
| Wordwall | English, no kidding | |
|---|---|---|
| Core format | Templated games (quiz, match, crossword, etc.) | Speaking, vocabulary, and debate activities with AI-generated prompts |
| Speaking practice | Not a template category | Core focus — most apps require unscripted spoken output |
| CEFR calibration | Not built in | Every app constrained to a chosen CEFR level (A1–C2) |
| Free tier | 3 activities, 12 templates | All apps included, 100 AI credits/month |
| Entry paid tier | €5/month (Standard) | €5/month (Innovator, 300 credits/month) |
| Content freshness | Fixed template, teacher-authored or AI-assisted questions | New prompt generated on demand, never repeats identically |
| Community library | 25M+ shared resources to search and adapt | N/A — content is generated per class, not searched |
Neither column is strictly "better." A teacher who needs a printable crossword for Friday's vocabulary review still wants Wordwall. A teacher whose next 15 minutes need to be spoken-language production, not recall, needs something built around generation rather than templates.
What actually replaces the Wordwall gap
These are the ENK apps built specifically for the speaking-practice slot Wordwall's template list doesn't cover:
- Spin & Speak (A2–C1) — a spin lands on a topic, and the student talks for 60 seconds without stopping. No pre-written question bank to search through; a new topic every spin.
- Sentence Lab (A2–B2) — three unrelated words appear, and students build one sentence using all three, then defend why it works out loud.
- Ask, Tell, Reveal (A1–B2) — a circle format where students ask, answer, and share something true, with no script and no roles assigned in advance.
- Dialogue Factory (A2–C1) — two students rehearse an AI-generated dialogue, then progressively lose the lines until they're speaking from memory.
- Grammar Smash (A1–C2) — the closest thing to a Wordwall-style drill in the ENK lineup, but every drill is freshly generated at the level and grammar point the teacher picks, instead of pulled from a shared template.
All 26 apps are covered under one free account with 100 monthly AI credits, or from €5/month for 300 credits on the pricing page — the same entry price as Wordwall's Standard tier, for a different job.
Do you need to switch, or just add?
Most ESL classrooms don't need to pick one. Wordwall is still a fast, cheap way to build a recall-based warm-up or a printable review game, and nothing about running speaking-focused apps changes that. The realistic setup is running both: Wordwall for the five-minute vocabulary settler, an ENK app for the block of class time where students actually need to talk.
FAQ
Is there a free Wordwall alternative for ESL speaking practice? Yes — English, no kidding's free plan includes all 26 apps with 100 AI credits per month, which covers a meaningful number of speaking-focused sessions before any payment is required.
Does Wordwall have any speaking activities at all? Not as a dedicated template category. Its 34 templates (12 on Basic and Standard, 34 total on Pro) are built around quizzes, matching, and recall formats where the answer is defined in advance, not open spoken output.
Can I use Wordwall and an ENK app in the same lesson? Yes, and it's a reasonable way to run a class — a Wordwall quiz to review vocabulary, followed by a speaking app like Spin & Speak or Sentence Lab to put that vocabulary to use out loud.
Is Wordwall or an ENK app better for large classes? Wordwall's quiz and gameshow formats scale well to large groups because everyone can play at once from one screen. Speaking-focused ENK apps generally work best in pairs or small groups so each student actually gets talking time, which usually means running them alongside a partner-rotation or team structure rather than as a single whole-class activity.
Written by Prof. Vito Schiuma, designer of English, no kidding.