Describing People ESL Lesson With Vocabulary and Activities (Free PDF)

This describing people ESL lesson runs 60 minutes and takes students from A1 to B2 through appearance, personality and the phrases that hold a description together. You get vocabulary tables, a timed lesson plan, six speaking activities and a free printable pack for five of them. It also covers the question students ask most, which is how to describe a person without sounding rude. The examples describe invented people, and none of the activities in this post uses photos of real people. Take the whole plan or just the tables. Each section works on its own, so you can teach only the part your level needs.

Describing Appearance

A good appearance description moves from general to specific. Height and build come first, then age, hair, face and anything that makes the person easy to recognize. Teach appearance adjectives in these groups, and students will remember where each word belongs.

Clothes are part of physical appearance for most students, so this is a natural link to a lesson on clothes and fashion. Fashion Tips (A2-B1) is free and has students describe outfits and give compliments, and our clothes and fashion discussion questions keep the talk going.

Three mistakes come up in almost every class. Teach the split clearly. Use be for height, build and age, and use have for hair, eyes and features. In American English, has is more common than has got, so teach has first.

Adjective Order When Describing Appearance

When two or three adjectives come before hair, eyes or clothes, they follow a fixed order: opinion, size or length, age, shape, color, origin, material. So it's long curly black hair, never curly black long hair. In speech, most people use two adjectives at most, so don't push students to stack more. For games that practice this rule, see our article on adjective games.

Personality Adjectives for ESL Students

Personality adjectives are harder than appearance words because the same behavior can sound good or bad. Stubborn and determined describe the same person, but one criticizes and the other praises. Teach describing personality in three groups, then show the pairs that cross the line.

Point out the near pairs: determined and stubborn, confident and arrogant, careful with money and stingy, honest and blunt. Students learn more from one pair like this than from a long list of adjectives to describe people or twenty character traits. Positive and negative adjectives also depend on context, so ask students when being competitive helps and when it doesn't.

With A1-A2 classes, the Personality Types lesson introduces basic personality adjectives through a four-animal quiz. The personality section has more lessons up to C1, including one on introverts and one on workplace personality tests.

Native speakers rarely describe a flaw directly. They soften it with patterns like He can be a bit stubborn, She tends to be impatient in the mornings or He's not the most organized person. Teach these three patterns at B1, and students sound kinder and more natural at once. Praise works the other way, with stronger words, as in She's amazingly generous or He's one of the most reliable people I know. Activity 1 below turns the three columns and the softening patterns into a short puzzle.

Useful Phrases for Describing People

These sentence patterns are the core of how to describe a person in English. Teach each question together with its answer, because students need both.

Look like and be like cause most of the mistakes. Look like is about the outside: "What does your brother look like?" "He's tall and has curly hair." Be like is about the inside: "What's your brother like?" "He's funny and very generous." A quick test for students: if a photo could answer the question, it's look like.

Two smaller slips are worth correcting early. Students drop the article in She has a beard, and they mix looks and looks like in He looks like tired. The rule of thumb is short. Use looks with an adjective and looks like with a noun.

Describing People Lesson Plan

The easiest way to see how a describing people lesson plan works is to look at a real one. Freckles, Curls, and More is a 60-minute B1-B2 lesson from our library, and it is marked Free, so you can open the whole plan. It moves through four stages.

1. Lead-in. Students answer one question: "How would you describe a person to a friend at a party?" In pairs, they describe people in photos without using names. This shows them at once which words they are missing.
2. Vocabulary. Students meet precise words for faces and hair, such as pin-straight, fine hair, coily hair, spiral curls, dimples, a cleft chin and sun spots. They match the words to images and explain them to each other, so every word is used aloud at least once.
3. Reading. Groups read about four invented characters, Emma, Marcus, Sofia and Kai, each with distinct features and lifestyles. Each group picks out the key details, then describes its character to the rest of the class from memory.
4. Speaking. Groups take on everyday challenges, like describing a guest at a party or helping a friend spot a blind date in a busy restaurant. The task only works if the description is clear enough to pick the right person.

For homework, students complete a worksheet with collocations, gap-fill sentences and error correction. The lesson also comes with a Quizlet set, a Miro board and interactive homework. To build a lesson of your own on the same pattern, our guide to teaching vocabulary shows how word maps can carry the vocabulary stage. With A1 classes, spend the whole lesson on appearance and leave personality for the next one. With B2 classes, skip the basic table and go straight to the near pairs and the softening patterns.

Speaking Activities and Games

Each activity below comes with a ready example you can read out or put on the board. Activities 1 to 5 each have a page in the free Describing People Speaking Pack, and activity 6 needs nothing at all.

1. Three-Card Personality Puzzle

Softening a flaw is also the core skill in Pet Peeves (B1-B2), where students talk about the habits that annoy them, with an episode of the esl.laboratory podcast.

2. Police Sketch Artist

2of 6A2-B120 minAppearanceFree printable · page 2 How it works Student A looks at a drawing of an invented face and describes it. Student B draws it without looking, then they compare. They swap roles with a new face. Why it works It trains precise vocabulary, because "a big nose" produces a very different sketch from "a long, narrow nose". A good description at A2-B1 sounds like this: "He's in his forties. He has a round face, short wavy hair and a gray mustache. His eyes are small, and he has a scar above his left eyebrow. He looks tired." Free printable · page 2 Six invented faces, three for each student, with empty frames to draw in and a word bank for face, hair, eyes and extras. Face A1 is the man in the model description. Download the free PDF

For B1-B2 classes that want more precise words than the word bank, stage 2 of Freckles, Curls, and More adds pin-straight, spiral curls, a cleft chin and sun spots.

3. Describe Your Role Model

4. Dating Profile

5. Find a Classmate Who

6. Guess Who

Describing People Worksheet

The free pack above is for speaking. For written practice after the speaking stage, the library also has a describing people worksheet at A2-B1. It teaches 14 words for physical appearance, with a rule card on when to use is and when to use has. Students then work through three types of tasks. They choose is or has in short sentences, find the mistakes in a description of a picture, and solve a logic puzzle about five people at a family reunion. Students also complete a description of two grandparents from a word box. The answers are in the Teacher's Version. Use the sheet as homework after this lesson, or as a short class of its own for A2 students.

Ready-Made Lessons on Personality and Appearance

The library has full lessons on both halves of this topic. Three of them are marked Free, so you can try the format before you subscribe.

Standard gives you the lesson PDFs and a Quizlet set for every lesson, Plus adds homework, and Pro adds Miro boards, interactive homework and games. Compare plans.

Describing People FAQ

What level should students be to start describing people?

Start at A1 with be, have and a handful of words like tall, short, young and hair colors. Personality adjectives and look like versus be like fit A2-B1. Near pairs like stubborn and determined are B2 work.

How do I stop students from using offensive words?

Teach the polite options from the start and explain why they matter. Students usually want to be polite and simply don't know which words sound harsh in English.

What is the difference between look like and be like?

Look like asks about appearance, and be like asks about personality. "What does she look like?" gets "She's tall." "What's she like?" gets "She's kind."

How many new words should I teach in one lesson?

Twelve to fifteen. That is enough for a full description and few enough to use in the same class.

Do I need to sign up to download the PDF?

No. The Describing People Speaking Pack is a direct download, in A4 and US Letter.