Information gap activity: Endangered animals

By Pete on April 4, 2026 • ( 0 )

I did an info gap activity with my Year 9 class the other day that worked well. It’s pretty similar to others I’ve done, e.g. this one about Kenya, but if it ain’t broke…

Topic: Endangered animals in Thailand. The topic of conservation came up in our coursebook Global English 9, Unit 5: Science.

(Do I not like that [coursebook] – Do I not like that…!

Anyway…)

Objective: introduce/review key terms related to conservation; raise awareness of threats to wildlife in Thailand.

Procedure:

We started with a Wordwall find the match to intro the animals

Would have been nice here to springboard into a chat about what they know about the animals already, if they’d seen one in the wild, etc. Oh well.
I gave each learner a table like this:

Each learner was then given a cut-up with info about a different animal. There were 14 students and 2 staff so all the animals were covered!

Learners had a chance to ask questions about unknown words at this point. And whichever animal info they’d been given, the same key facts were covered (lovingly prepared by ChatGPT). This info was:

Learners then had one minute only to identify the key info and add it to their table in note form. Modelled like so:

I took the slips in. Learners then had 8 minutes to walk around and asked as many classmates they could about their animals, finding out the key info.

A: Which animal do you know about?

B: The Indochinese Tiger. They’re endangered and-

A: Like… critically endangered?

B: No, just endangered. And the biggest threat to these tigers is from poaching and habitat destruction…

Etc

Once the time was up, I paired the students up to compare notes. Then I gave them a quiz, making the questions up on the spot from the info slips I just took in. The quiz naturally involved learners using some of the new terms, plus I fed in some more:

Me: What’s the conservation status of the Asian Elephant in Thailand?

Me: Name an animal in this activity that is often traded illegally.

etc

Reflection:

I could have optimised the activity, but it was a good way to introduce vocab and get learners speaking and collaborating. You have to be strict on rules, like ‘you can’t just copy other’s notes’ or ‘you can only speak to one person at a time’ just to keep the communicative element.

With AI, info gap activities as an engaging lead-in, vocab review, etc, can be really quick to make now. Did I check the facts though? I should have… Man – imagine! As a coursebook writer I’d have to send in all these sources/references to prove my texts were fact-checked. These days, I’m just carelessly relying on AI info. But you know, we’ve all been guilty of that at least once, right?

Anyhow, this was a good springboard into a research project – looking at eco-lodges and conservation projects here in Thailand.