I've had good luck with improving speaking and recognition skills with some class games.

These do depend on some fluency with the language, not for absolute beginners.

I've had good luck getting the students to debate.
I'll pick one of the students, ask them their opinion
on a controversial issue. Then I'll pick somebody else
to respond. I act as referee to keep conversation going. (This was in India, where I had to prompt people to 'come forward' a bit)
It's useful to pick someone and ask them to state another person's opinion, or say what they said. That tests listening skills.

You can also hand out homework of reading an article in English and debate the article the next day.

I've also had luck with 'telephone' - one student thinks up a phrase in English, writes it down, then whispers it to the student sitting next to them. They translate to their base language and whisper to the next student.
The last student translates the message aloud, then the original student reads their original message.

This teaches understanding while hearing words under different circumstances than normal.

I also had a good experience with cooperative work.
Divide students into teams, give each team a pile of newspaper and a gluepot or tape.

The teams compete to create the tallest tower. They may only speak English during the exercise.

This gives students confidence in actually using the language to communicate, not just in academic recitals, etc.

I had poor luck with showing an English language movie and having the students answer questions about the movie. I only had a few movies, I used a western, so perhaps the accents didn't help.
On the other hand, the movie had long pauses between dialog, which helped.

I had better luck getting each student to imitate a midwestern US accent, saying "Howdy, my name's ____ and I'm from ______"

I had good luck with an exercise where I called on each student in turn and they had to say something about the US. Then I responded to what they said.
This was mostly a listening exercise.