Ask, Tell, Reveal
A circle of spontaneous conversation. Students take turns asking, answering, and sharing one personal truth — no script, no hiding.
Open App →Free Circle
- 1Sit everyone in a circle so the student who receives the prompt can make eye contact with whoever they address their Ask or Tell toward.
- 2Keep the teacher inside the circle, not outside it — participating alongside students lowers the affective filter and models the target speech acts.
- 3Allow students to pass once per session if a Reveal prompt feels too personal — no explanation required. This builds psychological safety without eliminating challenge.
- 4Chain reactions work best when the follow-up prompt appears on screen immediately after the first student speaks — keep the app live throughout.
The Teaching Logic Behind Ask, Tell, Reveal
Ask, Tell, Reveal generates prompts across three distinct speech acts. An Ask prompt directs a student to ask a classmate a specific question. A Tell prompt asks a student to describe, narrate, or explain something. A Reveal prompt asks them to share one personal fact, opinion, or secret — the highest-stakes action type that builds class cohesion.
Scaffolding phrases — sentence starters and response frames — appear below each prompt at lower levels and gradually disappear as levels increase. At A1, three scaffolds support every prompt. At C1, only one scaffold is offered. The scaffolding system ensures that lower-level students can participate fully while higher-level students are pushed toward spontaneous production.
A chain-reaction mechanic lets the app generate a follow-up prompt based on what the previous student said. This creates a natural conversational thread rather than disconnected individual performances — the class moves toward dialogue, not just a sequence of monologues.
Why It Works
Different speech acts require different language resources
Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) classify utterances by their illocutionary force — what they do, not just what they say. Ask, Tell, and Reveal are three distinct illocutionary types, each requiring different discourse strategies and language forms. Practising all three develops pragmatic range, not just propositional fluency.
Personal disclosure lowers the anxiety barrier
Krashen (1982) argues that affective factors — including anxiety and low self-esteem — block language acquisition. Reveal prompts, which invite personal truth-telling, create a moment of authentic personal connection that lowers the affective filter and makes the classroom a less threatening space.
Personal questions create information gaps
Long (1996) shows that information-gap tasks — where one party genuinely does not know what the other will say — produce authentic negotiation of meaning. Because Reveal prompts are personal, the class genuinely does not know the answer: this creates a real information gap that Ask prompts alone cannot produce.
Step-by-Step in Class
Set level and theme
Select the CEFR level (A1 through C1, including the A2+ and B1+ sub-levels) and a theme from the nine available categories — Family, Work, Hobbies, Travel, and so on. The theme keeps the vocabulary domain consistent across the session.
Generate and nominate
Click generate. Read the action type and prompt aloud. Nominate a student to respond. At lower levels, point to the scaffolding phrases on screen and encourage their use. At higher levels, hide scaffolding after reading the prompt.
Use chain reactions
After the student responds, click 'chain reaction' to generate a follow-up prompt based on what they said. The follow-up may be addressed back to the same student or passed to a new one, extending the conversational thread naturally.
Debrief the speech act
Every 3–4 rounds, pause and ask the class: 'That was an Ask. What phrases did you notice they used to ask the question?' Building metalinguistic awareness of the speech act types helps students deploy them consciously in future conversations.
How to Set It Up for Different Levels
Generates Tell prompts about immediately personal information (name, age, family, likes) with three sentence-starter scaffolds. Ask prompts use 'What', 'Where', 'Do you...' structures.
A1 students have limited productive range but can communicate about familiar personal topics. The scaffolding transforms the task from 'speak freely' to 'choose and complete a sentence' — a manageable and confidence-building distinction.
Generates Tell and Ask prompts requiring a stated opinion plus a basic reason. Two scaffolds include 'I think... because...' and 'In my opinion... which means...' frames.
B1 students can express preferences but often drop justification under time pressure. Scaffolds that include 'because' and 'which means' make the reason-giving requirement part of the sentence frame rather than an optional addition.
Generates Reveal prompts that require hypothetical self-disclosure: 'If you could change one thing about how schools work, what would it be and why?' One minimal scaffold provided.
C1 learners need practice with hypothetical and speculative registers, not just opinion-giving. Reveal prompts at this level push students to use complex conditional, modal, and hedging language in an authentic, low-threat conversational context.
Ways to Extend the Game
Scaffold Removal Challenge
Show scaffolding for the first response. For the second student on the same prompt, hide the scaffolding. The class compares both versions — which was more fluent? Which was more accurate? Metacognitive reflection on the scaffolding crutch.
Question Upgrade
After an Ask prompt generates a basic question, the class votes on how to upgrade it by adding a follow-up, a conditional, or a polite hedge. The original student must then ask the upgraded version.
Truth or Lie
For Reveal prompts, students are secretly told by the teacher to either tell the truth or make up a plausible lie. After they speak, the class votes on truth or lie. Raises stakes and develops the persuasive language of convincing delivery.
Conversation Map
After 8–10 rounds, students draw a simple mind map showing who spoke to whom and what each chain-reaction link connected. Visualises the structure of the conversation and identifies students who were not engaged.
Pair It With
Spin & Speak
Spin & Speak is the solo extended-speaking step up from Ask Tell Reveal — after students have built conversational confidence through short exchanges, they are ready to sustain a 60-second monologue on a topic.
Reaction Reactor
Reaction Reactor builds on the Reveal speech act by giving students target expressions for responding to surprising disclosures — the natural language that follows a Reveal needs exactly the kind of idiom practice Reaction Reactor provides.
Dialogue Factory
Dialogue Factory takes the conversational dynamics explored in Ask Tell Reveal and scripts them: students see how Ask–Answer–Reveal structures appear in realistic written dialogues, reinforcing the oral patterns with a scripted model.