Book excerpt: First Discussion Starters includes conversation activities that teachers and students have loved in the best-selling Discussion Starters and More DiscussionStarters, this time for lower-level ESL/EFL students. First Discussion Starters contains: *a variety of tasks and exercises based on real situations from all over the world serious discussion topics such as censorship, prison conditions, and cloning *topics that are lighter in nature such as lotteries, pets, and travel *activities that require students to work together in pairs or small groups to reach a conclusion about a topic *several kinds of oral fluency activities such as problem-solving tasks, court cases, "finish the story," "put the story together," and small group presentations *links to related websites for each unit